Welcome to Edition 9.18 of the Rocket Report! Blue Origin packed a lot of news into one afternoon Thursday with the reveal of a new kick stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design, and the minor and widely expected delay for New Glenn’s return-to-flight mission from December until January. The reconstruction of Blue Origin’s wrecked launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues apace after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There’s a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon, and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.
SpaceX vets work on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially harvestable resource on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, Ars reports. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. Argo Space’s satellites will use water not only as a propellant, but also as a coolant and radiation shield.
How does this work? … Argo Space flew its first mission in July, but the spacecraft failed after one of its solar arrays didn’t deploy, and there wasn’t enough time to test the propulsion system. Two more missions are on Argo Space’s schedule for 2027 to demonstrate the company’s water-based thrusters. The propulsion system is basically a small rocket that uses hydrogen and oxygen as propellants. However, instead of launching with separate tanks of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the satellite carries a reservoir of liquid water. In space, the vehicle uses solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases and burns them to generate thrust.
