Rocket Report: New Shepard will be expensive, Falcon 9 nets Moon mission

Enlarge / The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 2.17 of the Rocket Report! The big news of this week came when SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed his Starship in South Texas on Saturday night. The vehicle remains a long way from orbit, to be sure. Yet SpaceX sure seems a lot closer to realizing its dream of a flight-worthy Starship and Super Heavy than it did three years ago.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Relativity Space is terran up the venture capital markets. Relativity Space announced Tuesday that it has closed a $140 million Series C funding round led by Bond Capital and Tribe Capital. (The puns come at no additional cost). With this funding, Relativity Chief Executive Tim Ellis told Ars that the company is fully funded to complete development of its Terran 1 rocket and reach orbit. However, instead of that happening in 2020, the first launch has now slipped into early 2021.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments