Every Cosmic Herald story on Rocket Lab — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
L3Harris and Sierra Space will build 36 new missile-tracking satellites for $1.75 billion, pushing the Space Development Agency's Tranche 3 constellation to 104 spacecraft in support of the Golden Dome missile-defense architecture.
Read the story →Latitude, launch azimuth, and downrange safety corridors dictate where a rocket can lift off. A tour of Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Baikonur, Kourou, Wenchang, and Mahia shows the physics — and the history — behind each choice.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan Centaur, Neutron, Ariane 6, and six more launch vehicles compared on payload, cost per launch, and reusability, including China's Long March 10B, which on July 10 became just the third rocket in history to catch its own booster.
Space Systems Command has admitted Relativity Space and Impulse Space to the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract pool, giving the two commercial newcomers a shot at up to $5.6 billion in military launch task orders.
Space Systems Command admitted Impulse Space and Relativity's Relativity Federal to NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 on July 7, growing the qualified-provider pool to seven and handing each a $5 million task order.
Over the July 4th weekend, Rocket Lab launched a Space Force satellite in 16 hours 42 minutes, then True Anomaly's autonomous JACKAL-0004 found and imaged it in 61 hours — the first commercial orbital intercept in history.
Rocket Lab's Puma launched 16 hours after notice and, guided only by its own sensors, tracked down and photographed True Anomaly's orbiting Jackal-0004 satellite — a rehearsal for spotting adversary spacecraft with almost no warning.
Rocket Lab will acquire satellite operator Iridium in a cash-and-stock deal valuing it near $8 billion, buying 66 working satellites, rare L-band spectrum, and instant recurring revenue instead of building it all itself.
Commercial space surveillance firms independently detected a Chinese spaceplane deploying an object in orbit, underscoring the growing clout of private-sector space domain awareness.
Rocket Lab's Electron delivers a Space Force satellite for the Victus Haze exercise, testing whether the U.S. can rapidly deploy orbital assets when a crisis demands it.
Two-year-old Hefei startup Spark Space has test-fired its Lieyan-2 kerosene-LOX engine and closed back-to-back funding rounds totaling over $14.8M, racing to debut its Jinhua-1 rocket by 2027.
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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