Space Industry Weekly: Launch Records Shatter While Military Space Takes Center Stage

Team, here with your week­ly space indus­try roundup. This past week has been absolute­ly packed with devel­op­ments that are reshap­ing both com­mer­cial and mil­i­tary space oper­a­tions. From SpaceX hit­ting triple dig­its to the Space Force prepar­ing for orbital com­bat, let’s dive into what’s been hap­pen­ing above our heads.

SpaceX Shatters Launch Records (Again)

SpaceX just crossed a mile­stone that would have seemed impos­si­ble just a few years ago — they launched their 100th Fal­con 9 rock­et of 2025 on Mon­day morn­ing from Van­den­berg Space Force Base. To put this in per­spec­tive, they hit this mark on Octo­ber 20th last year, mean­ing they’re run­ning near­ly two months ahead of their 2024 pace. At this rate, SpaceX will launch more Fal­con 9s this year than NASA flew Space Shut­tle mis­sions in three decades.

The com­pa­ny has also reas­signed about 20% of its Fal­con 9 engi­neer­ing team to work on Star­ship for the next six months, fol­low­ing three con­sec­u­tive upper stage fail­ures ear­li­er this year. Their tenth Star­ship test flight is sched­uled for today (Sun­day), with engi­neers believ­ing they’ve solved the dif­fuser issue that caused May’s fail­ure. We’ll see if Ver­sion 3 of Star­ship, expect­ed late this year or ear­ly 2026, can final­ly deliv­er on the vehi­cle’s ambi­tious promises.

Military Space Operations Enter New Era

The U.S. Space Com­mand is no longer play­ing defense. Gen­er­al Stephen Whit­ing made it crys­tal clear this week: “We now have a com­bat­ant com­mand focused on war fight­ing in space.” This shift from defen­sive to offen­sive capa­bil­i­ties marks a fun­da­men­tal change in how Amer­i­ca approach­es space security.

Last year’s joint U.S.-French satel­lite maneu­ver near a for­eign satel­lite (like­ly Russ­ian) demon­strat­ed new ren­dezvous and prox­im­i­ty oper­a­tions capa­bil­i­ties. The exer­cise was so suc­cess­ful, they’re plan­ning to repeat it lat­er this year. Mean­while, the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office has launched over 200 satel­lites since 2023, with SpaceX report­ed­ly lead­ing the com­pe­ti­tion for a new 450-satel­lite con­stel­la­tion to track mis­sile launches.

The inte­gra­tion of AI is par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing — Space Com­mand has built “Space­Bot,” a large lan­guage mod­el trained on oper­a­tional data that can com­plete tasks “at machine speed” that pre­vi­ous­ly required ten peo­ple and five hours.

International Launch Developments

The glob­al launch land­scape con­tin­ues to evolve rapid­ly. Fire­fly Aero­space signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing with Japan’s Space Cotan to study launch­ing their Alpha rock­et from Hokkai­do Space­port, which would give them access to the Asian satel­lite mar­ket and pro­vide redun­dan­cy for U.S. allies.

Chi­na’s space ambi­tions faced a set­back when Land­Space’s Zhuque-2E Y2 methane rock­et failed dur­ing an upper stage anom­aly, los­ing four Guowang inter­net satel­lites. Despite this, Chi­na suc­cess­ful­ly test-fired its Long March 10 rock­et’s cen­ter core with sev­en YF-100K engines, keep­ing them on track for crewed lunar mis­sions before 2030. They’ve also approved devel­op­ment of the Long March 10B vari­ant, and Bei­jing-based Ark­tech secured fund­ing for their mas­sive Glacier‑1 rock­et capa­ble of lift­ing 40,000 kg to LEO.

In Europe, Avio gained a 10-year license to oper­ate Vega rock­ets from French Guiana inde­pen­dent­ly of Ari­ane­space. At the same time, Ari­ane 6 com­plet­ed its third launch, deploy­ing the MetOp-SG-A1 weath­er satellite.

Major Industry Moves and Funding

True Anom­aly raised $260 mil­lion in Series C fund­ing (mix of equi­ty and debt) to devel­op space­craft for nation­al secu­ri­ty mis­sions. The com­pa­ny plans four mis­sions over the next 18 months and will grow from 170 to 250 employees.

Rock­et Lab com­plet­ed its $275 mil­lion acqui­si­tion of Geost, expand­ing its role as a defense con­trac­tor with elec­tro-opti­cal and infrared sen­sor capa­bil­i­ties. Spin­Launch secured $30 mil­lion for its Merid­i­an Space broad­band con­stel­la­tion, sup­ple­ment­ing April’s $12 mil­lion from Kongs­berg Defence and Aerospace.

On the ser­vices side, Amen­tum began work on the $4 bil­lion Space Force Range Con­tract after com­peti­tor RGNext dropped its legal chal­lenge. They’re tasked with mod­ern­iz­ing launch ranges to han­dle high­er launch rates.

Policy Shifts and Controversies

NASA’s act­ing admin­is­tra­tor Sean Duffy cre­at­ed waves by stat­ing the agency would “move aside” Earth sci­ence pri­or­i­ties in favor of explo­ration. In his Fox Busi­ness inter­view on August 14th, Duffy specif­i­cal­ly stat­ed: “All of the cli­mate sci­ence and all of the oth­er pri­or­i­ties that the last admin­is­tra­tion had at NASA, we’re going to move aside. All of the sci­ence that we do is going to be direct­ed towards explo­ration, which is the mis­sion of NASA. That’s why we have NASA, is to explore, not to do all of these Earth sci­ences.” This shift would rep­re­sent a major shift for NASA since Earth sci­ence — includ­ing cli­mate mon­i­tor­ing — has been a core NASA mis­sion since the agen­cy’s found­ing. In fact, the 1958 law that cre­at­ed NASA lists as its first objec­tive “the expan­sion of human knowl­edge of the Earth and of phe­nom­e­na in the atmos­phere and space.”

In oth­er news, the Air Nation­al Guard’s trans­fer to the Space Force remains con­tentious. Despite Pres­i­dent Trump’s 2024 cam­paign promise to cre­ate a Space Nation­al Guard, the trans­fer of 578 posi­tions begins on Octo­ber 1st. A Col­orado sur­vey showed only 8 of 101 space oper­a­tors were will­ing to trans­fer full-time, high­light­ing the resis­tance to this reorganization.

In the UK, it has announced plans to fold its own Space Agency into the Depart­ment for Sci­ence, Inno­va­tion, and Tech­nol­o­gy by April 2026, rais­ing indus­try con­cerns about reduced vis­i­bil­i­ty into space spending.

Looking Ahead: Space-Based Solar Power

A new study from King’s Col­lege Lon­don and Xi’an Jiao­tong Uni­ver­si­ty sug­gests space-based solar pow­er could pro­vide 80% of Europe’s renew­able ener­gy by 2050. The research ana­lyzed NASA’s heliosat swarm and pla­nar array designs, find­ing poten­tial cost sav­ings of 7–15% com­pared to ground-based solar, plus a two-thirds reduc­tion in bat­tery require­ments due to con­sis­tent pow­er generation.

Notable Launches and Milestones

The X‑37B space­plane launched on its eighth mis­sion Thurs­day night aboard a Fal­con 9, car­ry­ing exper­i­ments includ­ing laser com­mu­ni­ca­tions and quan­tum iner­tial sen­sors. The pre­vi­ous mis­sion last­ed 908 days, and no dura­tion has been announced for this flight.

In a his­toric first, Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents launched Canada’s first space rock­et in 25 years with their Star­sailor vehi­cle. How­ev­er, it sep­a­rat­ed ear­li­er than planned and did­n’t reach the Kár­mán line.

The Bottom Line

This week per­fect­ly encap­su­lates the cur­rent state of the space indus­try — com­mer­cial com­pa­nies are achiev­ing unprece­dent­ed launch cadences. In con­trast, mil­i­tary space oper­a­tions open­ly embrace offen­sive capa­bil­i­ties. The inte­gra­tion of AI, the push toward reusabil­i­ty across mul­ti­ple providers, and the con­tin­ued inter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion for lunar land­ing capa­bil­i­ties all point to an indus­try that’s matur­ing rapid­ly while still push­ing boundaries.

As we watch Star­ship’s tenth test flight and mon­i­tor the ongo­ing Nation­al Guard inte­gra­tion debates, one thing is clear: space is no longer just about explo­ration and sci­ence. It’s about nation­al secu­ri­ty, eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness, and increas­ing­ly, the infra­struc­ture that will define the next cen­tu­ry of human activ­i­ty both on and off Earth.

Until next time, keep look­ing up!

August 31, 2025

Posted in Space.