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268 Landings, Starship V3 & Rocket Lab's Record Quarter
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX records its 268th consecutive Falcon 9 booster landing as Starship V3 targets a mid-May Flight 12, while Rocket Lab's contract surge signals a reshaping commercial launch market. From Voyager 1's power cuts to Orbex's collapse, this episode covers every major development in space this week.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Two hundred and sixty-eight. That's the number of consecutive successful Falcon 9 booster landings SpaceX has now recorded.
The clearest near-term test of that progress is Starship. The Super Heavy booster completed a fifteen-second test fire this week, and SpaceX is now targeting mid-May for Flight twelve using the new V3 configuration.
While SpaceX refines the top of the market, Rocket Lab is rewriting the rules at the small-lift end. The company signed thirty-one Electron contracts and five dedicated Neutron launch agreements in the first quarter of twenty twenty-six alone.
Not everyone is consolidating gains. Orbex, the Scottish micro-launch startup, has ceased operations.
Firefly Aerospace is attempting a different path through that sorting. The company's upgraded Alpha Block 2 rocket, featuring stretched stages and improved avionics, is targeting a late summer twenty twenty-six debut.
And then there's a completely different kind of engineering challenge. NASA has shut down one of Voyager one's science instruments to conserve power.
What ties this week together is a single underlying theme: maturity. The launch industry is separating reliable operators from aspirational ones.
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