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Rocket Report: Engines installed for Artemis III; Long March 6C breakup in LEO

September 4, 2026

Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Origin is that the company is targeting a return to flight with New Glenn by the end of the year, but there’s good reason for skepticism.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.

Mourning period… This launch window comes as Norway is in a period of national mourning following the death of King Harald V. Isar’s founder, Daniel Metzler, told NRK he hopes to launch before the late king’s funeral on September 9, but the Norwegian government says the mission can go ahead normally during the mourning period. Isar Aerospace won a 200 million euro ($230 million) contract from the European Space Agency last month to support further development of new launch vehicles.

Europe’s other launch startups announce new funding. Spanish launch services provider PLD Space has secured an additional 108 million euros ($126 million) in funding as it prepares for the inaugural orbital launch attempt of its small Miura 5 rocket, European Spaceflight reports. The most recent fundraising was led by Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and came less than a week after PLD Space won a 159 million euro ($185 million) contract from the European Space Agency’s European Launcher Challenge program, alongside Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg.

HyImpulse, too… German launch services provider HyImpulse announced Wednesday that it had extended its Series A funding round by more than 50 million euros ($58 million), bringing its total funding to date to 125 million euros ($145 million), European Spaceflight reports. The company is currently preparing for the second flight of its suborbital SR75 rocket and the inaugural launch attempt of its larger orbital-class SL1 rocket. HyImpulse was not among the European companies that won contracts through the European Launcher Challenge.

NASA weighs new ways of buying rockets. NASA is consolidating many of its launch programs into a single office that is considering block buys of launches, Space News reports. NASA officials at the recent Small Satellite Conference discussed the creation of a new Commercial Access to Space office within NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, established earlier this year as part of an agency reorganization. The new office would be responsible for all launch activities at NASA except those for human spaceflight. Pete Wilczynski, the NASA official responsible for science missions in the Commercial Access to Space office, said one reason to combine separate launch activities is to aggregate launch demand and enable bulk buys of launches.

Following the Pentagon’s lead… The US Space Force employs a bulk buying scheme with its launch procurement office, guaranteeing its top launch providers—SpaceX and United Launch Alliance—a certain number of launch contracts over a period of several years. Proponents of this strategy say it results in lower launch prices for the government and assured business for launch providers, a factor that is especially important for new entrants in the market. “We’re looking at a new strategy that will entail an all-of-NASA approach, which means we may procure five, 10, 15, 20 rockets in a procurement,” Wilczynski said.

Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1 launches on first flight. Chinese commercial launch company Galactic Energy announced it successfully launched its first Pallas-1 rocket Monday, with future flights to attempt first stage recovery, Space News reports. The Pallas-1 is the sixth new Chinese rocket to debut this year, and the fifth with a potentially recoverable and reusable booster stage. Galactic Energy’s first rocket, the expendable, solid-fueled Ceres-1, has flown 23 times on missions carrying small satellites into low-Earth orbit. Pallas-1 is a medium-class rocket with a maximum payload capacity of about 15,400 pounds (7,000 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit.

Some doubt?… While Galactic Energy and Chinese state media heralded Monday’s launch as a success, the US Space Force had not added the Pallas-1 rocket’s upper stage or any payloads to its catalog of space objects as of late Thursday. This is highly unusual for a successful orbital launch. Jonathan McDowell, an expert tracker of spaceflight activity, noted on X that Galactic Energy has not announced the orbital altitude or inclination achieved by the Pallas-1 rocket. “I must regard success of the launch as not confirmed at this point,” McDowell wrote.

China’s Long March 6C can’t keep it together. A Chinese Long March 6C rocket upper stage has fragmented in orbit, just days after the stage delivered a seven-satellite rideshare mission, Space News reports. LeoLabs, a commercial space surveillance company, confirmed the breakup. The rocket launched August 24, but LeoLabs’ Multi-Object Detection tool flagged the fragmentation of the rocket’s upper stage less than two days later. “We estimate tens to hundreds of fragments were generated,” LeoLabs stated in an August 28 post on social media platform X.

An unenviable track record… The good news is that the rocket’s orbit is low enough that the debris should reenter the atmosphere within a few years. The bad news is that this breakup is the latest in a series of fragmentations afflicting the Long March 6 series, most notably the Long March 6A, which uses a slightly larger-diameter second stage than the 6C. Both rockets use a single YF-115 engine powered by kerosene-liquid-oxygen propellant. The Long March 6A breakups have been especially troubling, with more than 1,200 pieces of debris cataloged by the US Space Force from two upper stages in 2022 and 2024.

Ariane 6 aces first GTO mission. Arianespace has completed the first Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) mission with an Ariane 6, deploying the MTG-I2 weather satellite for European meteorological agency Eumetsat, Aviation Week and Space Technology reports. This was the rocket’s farthest mission so far. The two-booster Ariane 62 rocket took off August 27 from Kourou, French Guiana, and released its weather satellite payload about 30 minutes later. The spacecraft, soon to be renamed Meteosat-14, will use onboard propulsion to circularize its orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator to begin providing continuous weather observations over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Back to Europe… This launch marks Eumetsat’s return to European launch services after the weather agency launched its previous Meteosat weather satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2025. Delays in the debut and ramp-up of Ariane 6 launches forced several European customers to look overseas for launch services after the retirement of the Ariane 5 rocket in 2023. Doubts about Ariane 6’s competitiveness remain top of mind in Europe, but the rocket has proven fairly reliable. The Ariane 6 has notched eight flawless missions in nine launches since its first test flight in 2024.

India launches high-altitude Earth imager. India’s space program achieved another successful rocket launch Thursday, placing an Earth observation craft into orbit as New Delhi works to sharpen its satellite-based surveillance capabilities, Bloomberg reports. The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from the country’s main spaceport at Sriharikota, an island in southern India, and reached the designated orbit 18 minutes later. The payload was the Indian government’s EOS-05 satellite, a roughly 2.5-ton spacecraft with an Earth-facing telescope to provide near-continuous views of the same region of the world from a perch in geosynchronous orbit.

A do-over for ISRO… The EOS-05 satellite is a replacement for GISAT-1, which was lost in a GSLV launch failure in 2021. Geosynchronous orbit is an unusual location for a dedicated Earth observation satellite due to its high altitude, but it has the benefit of providing a constant vigil over a fixed geographic area. The Indian Navy is reportedly interested in geosynchronous surveillance of Earth. The mission of EOS-05 is different from a conventional weather satellite in that its telescope will capture optical images with a maximum resolution of 42 meters (138 feet). Modern geosynchronous weather satellites, such as NOAA’s GOES satellites, have weather instruments that cover wider areas at a resolution of about 500 meters (1,640 feet).

NASA launches next great observatory. NASA’s $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera sighted through a refurbished spy mirror, launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to reveal the mysterious forces driving the Universe, Ars reports. The new mission will extend the vision of NASA’s other famous observatories, providing a field of view 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope and complementing the groundbreaking work of the James Webb Space Telescope. Roman is just the second NASA-led astrophysics mission to launch this century, following the launch of Webb in 2021. Unlike Webb, which suffered many years of delays before reaching space, Roman arrived at the launch pad nine months before NASA’s commitment to send it skyward by May 2027.

Riding Falcon Heavy… SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket gave the Roman Space Telescope a ride toward a final operating post around the L2 Lagrange point nearly a million miles from Earth. This was the 13th flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a rocket most commonly used by NASA and the US military for strategic space science and national security missions. The rocket’s two side boosters returned to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, for reuse on another Falcon Heavy flight later this year.

Super Heavy static fire at Starbase. SpaceX took another step toward the highly anticipated next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket, Space.com reports. The rocket’s enormous first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, lit its 33 engines on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, on Friday, August 28. The static fire on Super Heavy followed a test-firing of the six-engine Starship upper stage earlier in August. This is the rocket that will power Flight 14 of Starship, scheduled for launch later this month. Flight 14 is expected to be the first Starship flight to low-Earth orbit after the previous 13 test flights targeted suborbital trajectories.

Unleashing Starlink V3… The orbital flight will allow SpaceX to deploy operational payloads. A batch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink “Version 3” satellites will launch on Flight 14. The new Starlink V3s are too large to fit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and they offer significant performance upgrades over the Starlink V2s that currently populate the network. SpaceX has not said how many Starlink V3s will launch on Flight 14. The company deployed 20 Starlink V3s on the previous Starship flight in July, but those satellites did not enter orbit. They reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, as intended, as Starship headed for a controlled splashdown northwest of Australia.

Blue Origin breaks ground on satellite hangar. While Blue Origin plows ahead with its reconstruction of its New Glenn launch pad at Cape Canaveral, damaged in a massive explosion earlier this year, it is also moving forward with new construction of an adjacent facility that will help the US Space Force, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Jeff Bezos’ company was awarded a $78 million contract last year by Space Systems Command to construct a space vehicle processing facility on Florida’s Space Coast by 2028. The hangar won’t be just for Blue Origin, though, but will support any launch provider flying national security payloads.

Thinking big… The Payload Processing Facility (PPF) will cover 120,000 square feet and will be large enough to accommodate Blue Origin’s planned 25.5-foot-diameter (8.7-meter) payload fairing for the company’s upgraded New Glenn rocket. Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, said the facility will house four payload processing bays, two encapsulation bays, and a multi‑manifest area supporting National Security Space Launch, civil, and commercial missions. Blue Origin is on a building spree at Cape Canaveral, with the rebuild of its partially destroyed launch pad at Launch Complex 36, the construction of a second launch pad, and now the PPF.