Seth Kurkowski

Blue Origin has finally formally announced a launch date for New Glenn‘s first flight, which will be no earlier than this Friday at 1:00 A.M. ET. The mission will carry its Blue Ring Pathfinder payload and be the first mission to certify it for national security missions by the Space Force.

Update: Blue Origin delays New Glenn launch due to recovery weather

We’re only into the first full week of the new year, and it’s already looking pretty packed, with Blue Origin looking to debut its New Glenn rocket while SpaceX is gearing up for its seventh Starship rocket. Both of these missions could have dynamic schedules, so it’s possible we’ll just be stuck with a handful of Starlink missions as well.

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Next week, SpaceX is hoping to launch its next Starship test flight, its seventh overall. The company released a detailed flight plan and explained what changes are coming to the new Block 2 Starship upper stage and what will be inside its payload bay.

It’s not very often a brand new rocket debuts from the Space Coast, at most a once-a-year ordeal. But here we are, static fire done, droneship… I mean, Landing Platform departing, and a TFR putting New Glenn‘s inaugural launch potentially early next week.

SpaceX has been the de facto launcher for most of the world ever since the Falcon 9 started ramping up its launch cadence and lowering costs about a decade ago. While many companies say they compete with SpaceX, in reality, they are a monopoly for commercial launch; if you need something done quickly, it’s going to be on a Falcon 9. Is 2025 finally the year we see another option emerge?

SpaceX launched its final mission of the year early this morning. Unshockingly to anyone, that was a batch of Starlink satellites. Tomorrow starts a whole new year of launching rockets, but how did SpaceX do in 2024? What sort of takeaways can we get for what we’ll see in 2025?

After tracking all of SpaceX’s launches over the year, here are the highlights.

Before the year is out, SpaceX will have launched 138 rockets in 2024, the vast majority out of the busiest spaceport in the world, Cape Canaveral. With the need to fit more Starlink missions into its manifest, it turned to the quiet spaceport of Vandenberg, where it launched 46 Falcon 9s, a new record.

It has been a busy year full of rocket launches, broken records, and new developments. While years past have been about the possibilities of what is to come, 2024 was about seeing those renderings come to life. Here are our top developments stories from 2024.

For ULA, 2024 was supposed to be the year of Vulcan. The year it debuted and the year it began flying national security missions. While it debuted, and flew a few times, delays to its certification have pushed that second goal to 2025.

Blue Origin successfully hot-fired its first New Glenn rocket at its launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday. The company also acquired permission to launch the rocket under the Part 450 launch license from the FAA, allowing it to finally make its dreams a reality and light the New Glenn candle.

As we wind down launches for 2024, we’re looking at what is to come in 2025. January looks to be a rather exciting time if you’re a Moon fan, as three companies will be starting their journey for their shot to land on the Moon, hopefully softly.

On this holiday week, we’re discussing SpaceX’s recent approval for Starship Flight 7’s launch license well ahead of the planned launch date, and almost overnight, Europe has another launch provider to bid on contracts with Avio’s takeover of the Vega C rocket.

This week we’re discussing SpaceX’s recent valuation of $350 billion, a staggering higher valuation than what was previously expected. Blue Origin is also still attempting to launch its first New Glenn rocket but is apparently battling regulators to get approval to complete its pre-launch tests.

SpaceX has conducted two static fires in the last week as it prepares for its seventh Starship launch. So where do things stand with getting this next step in Starship development quite literally off the ground?

Next year we will pass the milestone of a quarter century of a continued human presence in space thanks to the International Space Station. Led by NASA’s efforts to lead in LEO, NASA plans to take the lead in the commercial space station market as well. However, NASA’s method might not be what we expect it to be.

It will be a quiet launch week with only two days seeing orbital launches from China, Japan, and of course, SpaceX. The biggest story of the last week was with NASA; it received a nomination for the next NASA Administrator, then the outgoing Administrator announced the delay of the Artemis 2 and 3 missions.

President-elect Trump shared on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he plans to nominate private astronaut and businessman Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator. While Isaacman has had massive success in the private market and building his own space program, does he have the “Right Stuff” to lead the world’s premier space agency?

We are just a few weeks out from Starship Flight 6, but the buzz is in the air for what SpaceX plans to do next. We are now in December, which likely puts another launch out of the realm of possibility for 2024, but what exactly might we see for Flight 7?

Welcome back to another edition of Terminal Count. Starship has continued to command the news cycle even after its launch last month. That will likely not change for the foreseeable future; however, NASA’s Artemis 2 mission is entering the chat with the start of SLS stacking.