Commercial
Commercial spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, private space stations, and the new space economy.
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Commercial
OHB Wins Nearly €1 Billion to Build IRIS²'s First 18 Satellites as Europe's Sovereign Network Moves to Hardware
Germany's OHB landed a nearly €1 billion SES contract to build all 18 IRIS² medium-Earth-orbit satellites, the first hardware award since the EU's sovereign connectivity program signed its implementation agreement in early August.
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Commercial
SpaceX Unveils $100 Billion 'Starbase Louisiana,' Aiming to Build the Biggest Launch Site on Earth
SpaceX and Louisiana officials announced a $100 billion Gulf Coast spaceport with ten launch pads and, per Elon Musk, more than 30 Starship flights a day once built out.
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Commercial
NASA Adds Blue Origin, Firefly, and L3Harris to $100M Spacecraft Processing Contract
NASA on-ramped four companies — All Points Logistics, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, and L3Harris — to a $100 million payload processing contract that expands where commercial providers can prep spacecraft for launch.
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Commercial
SpaceX Sets Falcon 9 Turnaround Record With Twin Launches 38.5 Minutes Apart
SpaceX launched two Falcon 9 rockets from opposite U.S. coasts just 38.5 minutes apart on Aug. 15, 2026, setting a new back-to-back cadence record with a Globalstar replenishment mission from Florida and the classified USSF-366 flight from California.
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Commercial
Virgin Galactic Pushes First Commercial Delta Spaceflight to February 2027
Virgin Galactic told investors its new Delta-class spaceship won't fly paying customers until February 2027, blaming a pile-up of tiny tolerance and installation snags rather than one big failure.
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Commercial
Firefly Pushes Redesigned Alpha Rocket to Q4 After a Booster Exploded in Testing
Firefly Aerospace's Q2 10-Q and August 11 investor call confirm the Alpha Block 2 debut has slipped to Q4 2026, after an in-flight booster rupture and a September 2025 test-stand explosion forced a heavier redesign.
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Commercial
The First Air-Breathing Satellite Gets a Bus: Kreios Space Taps NanoAvionics to Fly an Engine That Eats the Atmosphere
Spanish startup Kreios Space will fly the first orbital demo of air-breathing electric propulsion on a Kongsberg NanoAvionics MP42 bus in 2028 — a ~200 kg satellite that scoops atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen for propellant, aiming to make 150-300 km orbits sustainable without carrying fuel.
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Commercial
Blue Origin Pins New Glenn Pad Explosion on a BE-4 Oxygen Valve
Blue Origin says a single malfunctioning main oxygen valve on a BE-4 engine destroyed New Glenn and 48 Amazon Leo satellites in May, with fixed hardware due late August and flights targeted before year's end.
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Commercial
Caltech and a JPL Spinoff Just Patented the Cooling Trick Space Data Centers Need
Sophia Space and Caltech won a U.S. patent for TILE, a modular passively-cooled computing panel meant to let data centers run in orbit, with an on-orbit demo planned for 2027.
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Commercial
FAA Wants to Waive 13 Environmental Laws to Speed Up Rocket Launch Licenses
The FAA's new proposed rule would let it bypass NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and 11 other statutes when licensing commercial rocket launches — the biggest shake-up of launch environmental oversight since 2021.
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Commercial
Starship Flight 13 Deploys First Operational Starlinks, but Booster Splashdown Gets Rough
SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 delivered 20 production Starlink satellites and an in-space Raptor relight, but Super Heavy limped to a hard splashdown on just five of 13 engines.
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Commercial
Intel Unveils 'Starfire,' Its First Space-Grade System-on-Chip for Government Satellites
Intel Government Technologies is entering the orbital computing market with Starfire, an 18A-process SoC aimed at giving satellites the onboard horsepower for AI-driven image analysis and anomaly detection.
