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
Rocket Lab's bid to challenge the Falcon 9 is down to a few months — and a few tests
Neutron, Rocket Lab's medium-lift, partially reusable rocket, is targeting its first flight in the last quarter of 2026. A tank failure earlier this year forced a redesign — but a fresh multi-launch deal shows customers are already betting on it.
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Commercial
The first privately owned space station is almost ready — and the clock behind it is the ISS
Vast's Haven-1 is on track to become the first commercial space station in orbit, a single module flying on a Falcon 9. It's a modest first step with an outsized purpose: proving private outposts can exist before the International Space Station comes down in 2030.
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Commercial
New Glenn blew up on the pad. Now NASA is decoupling its Moon plans from Blue Origin's rocket.
A static-fire explosion on 28 May wrecked Blue Origin's launch pad and put its New Glenn rocket on the sidelines. With a Blue Moon lunar lander waiting on that rocket, NASA is quietly rearranging the dependencies in its Artemis architecture.
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Commercial
Starship's V3 debut: a working ship, a wrecked booster, and a grounded fleet
Flight 12 introduced the larger Starship V3 and got further than the headlines suggest — the ship flew its mission. But the booster crashed, the FAA has ordered a mishap investigation, and the capability Artemis is waiting for still hasn't been shown.
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Commercial
A New Glenn explosion rattles Blue Origin — and NASA's Moon plans
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket detonated during a test on May 28, gutting its launch pad. The company vows to fly again this year; NASA warns the pad itself may not recover until 2028 — with consequences for Artemis.
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Commercial
China flies a new reusable rocket as its commercial push accelerates
The maiden flight of the Long March 12B on June 1 marks another step in China's drive toward reusable launchers — and another entrant in an increasingly crowded global market for cheap access to orbit.
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Commercial
Why most satellites now fly on a faint blue glow
Electric propulsion trades thrust for efficiency, delivering specific impulses an order of magnitude beyond chemical rockets. It is why modern constellations and deep-space probes do more with far less propellant — and why patience is the price.
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Commercial
How landing boosters rewrote the economics of spaceflight
Recovering an orbital booster was long assumed to be uneconomic. Falcon 9 disproved that operationally, and the industry has spent the years since reorganising around reuse — with one harder problem still unsolved.
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Commercial
By June, 2026 was already one of the busiest years in launch history
Barely half over, 2026 had logged 131 orbital launch attempts — driven by a Falcon 9 fleet flying every few days, a surging Chinese sector, and the maiden flight of Europe's heaviest Ariane 6.
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Commercial
A robot is about to grab an aging NASA telescope and push it higher
Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL will loft a Katalyst robotic spacecraft to boost the decaying orbit of NASA's Swift Observatory — a real-world test of commercial satellite servicing on a working science mission.
