Welcome to edition 6.44 of Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase Launch Facility, says the company expects to receive FAA launch clearance for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. He said that. It appears the rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two and a half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over Starship’s previous 7 months between flights and his 4 months.
As always, we We welcome reader contributions.If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (this form does not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report includes information about small, medium, and heavy lift rockets, as well as a summary of the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin will be on tap this weekend. Blue Origin is Sunday’s first manned space mission in nearly two years. The flight will take six passengers into suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) above West Texas. Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has not sent humans into space since the failure of its New Shepard rocket during an unmanned research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another unmanned suborbital mission in December.
historic flight … This is the 25th flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and the seventh crewed spaceflight mission on New Shepard. Before Blue Origin’s rocket failure in 2022, the company averaged a flight pace of about one launch every two months. Since then, flight rates have declined. Sunday’s flight is significant not only because it marks the resumption of launches for Blue Origin’s suborbital human spaceflight program, but also because its six-person crew includes aviation pioneers. Ed Dwight, 90, almost became the first black astronaut in 1963. A former Air Force captain, Dwight flew military fighter jets, graduated from test pilot school, and had a career similar to many of the early astronauts. He was on the final list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided to NASA, but the space agency did not include him. Dowai becomes the oldest person to fly in space.
Camden Spaceport has officially been decommissioned. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill dissolving the Camden County Spaceport Authority with one stroke of a pen. Action News Jax reported. The news follows a March 2022 referendum in which more than 70 percent of voters rejected a plan to purchase land for a spaceport on Georgia’s coastline between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. County officials tried to move forward with the spaceport idea after the referendum failed, but the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in February that the county must follow the wishes of voters.
$12 million for what?… The Camden County government, with a population of about 55,000, spent $12 million over 10 years on the Spaceport Camden initiative. Although the Spaceport Authority’s goal was to attract small launch companies to the area, no major launches have ever taken place from Camden County. State Rep. Steven Sainz, who introduced the bill to abolish the Spaceport Authority, said in a statement that the bill “reflects community choices and supports future collaboration on economic initiatives that better meet local needs. “We will pave the way for this.” (Posted by zapman987)
The Polaris Spaceplane continues toward even greater goals. German startup Polaris Spaceplanes said it is building prototype MIRA II and MIRA III spaceplanes after its subscale test vehicle MIRA was damaged earlier this year. european space flight report. The MIRA demonstration plane crash-landed during a test flight in February. The accident occurred at an airfield in Germany during takeoff, before the in-flight linear aerospace engine ignited. The remotely controlled MIRA prototype was approximately 4.25 meters long. Polaris announced on April 30 that it would not be repairing MIRA, but would instead proceed with construction of two larger vehicles.
It wasn’t released for nearly 16 months. … The MIRA II and MIRA III vehicles are 5 meters long and are powered by Polaris’ AS-1 aerospike engine, along with a jet engine that powers the aircraft before and after in-flight testing of the rocket engine . Aerospike engines are rocket engines designed to operate efficiently at all altitudes. The MIRA test vehicle is the predecessor to AURORA, a multipurpose spaceplane and hypersonic transport vehicle that Polaris says can carry payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit. (Submitted by Jay500001 and Tfargo04)