Rocket Report: Russia claims success with new ICBM; spaceplane déjà vu in Europe
Welcome to Edition 8.41 of the Rocket Report! The stories of the world's two most powerful rockets are now intertwined. Hardware for NASA's third Space Launch System rocket is coming together at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while SpaceX is readying its first upgraded Starship Version 3 rocket for liftoff from Starbase, Texas. The readiness of each vehicle, along with Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander, will go a long way toward determining the schedule and content of NASA's Artemis III mission in low-Earth orbit. We discuss those plans in this week's Rocket Report. 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. An Indian startup nears its first launch. After the Indian government opened a pathway in 2020 for private industry to build and launch its own rockets, one Indian startup is nearing the pad with its first orbital rocket, Ars reports . The most promising Indian launch company, Skyroot Aerospace, says its Vikram-1 launch vehicle could take flight within the next couple of months. And with a recent $60 million fundraising round valuing the firm at $1.1 billion, the company is poised to accelerate its commercial launch efforts. Read full article Comments
SpaceX’s upgraded Starship is set to launch on its first test flight as soon as Tuesday, May 19.
A pioneering name… Skyroot’s co-founder and CEO, Pawan Kumar Chandana, worked for the Indian space agency before splitting off in 2018 to establish Skyroot Aerospace in Hyderabad. Although India lacked a purely commercial space industry, Chandana believed that the rising country had the right ingredients in place: great engineers, a supplier base, government spaceports, and an advantageous location near the equator.
Skyroot named its initial line of vehicles “Vikram” in honor of the Indian physicist Vikram Sarabhai, who is considered the father of the Indian space program. As a testbed for its technology, Skyroot worked on a suborbital version of its rocket, Vikram-S, from 2020 to 2022 and launched the 6-meter rocket in November of that year. The larger Vikram-1 rocket now nearing its debut consists of three solid-fueled stages, with the capability to place up to a half-metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit.
