New Space EconomyBusiness, Technology, and Trends

The gap between when a rocket is announced and when it actually lifts off for the first time tells a story that the aerospace industry would often prefer to keep quiet. Nearly every medium lift launch vehicle developed since the 1990s has missed its original schedule by years, sometimes by nearly a decade, and the excuses change but the pattern holds with remarkable consistency across continents, contractor types, and budget sizes. What follows is an examination of that pattern through the specific histories of the most significant medium lift vehicles developed over the past four decades.

There are scientists who change a field, and then there are scientists who change how the field sees the universe. Vera Rubin was the second kind.

NASA has announced an increase in the cadence of its Artemis program, adding a new mission in 2027 and implementing an accelerated timeline for lunar exploration. The updates aim to establish an enduring presence on the Moon and improve mission reliability and safety.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has released its 2025 annual report assessing NASA's safety performance and highlighting significant challenges and recommendations for improvement.

Planned ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites could cause unforeseen harm to the ozone layer and climate systems. Global regulation is needed before it’s too late.

Astronomers captured the clearest example yet of one of these hidden explosions.

Rocket Lab’s present public baseline for Neutron is a Q4 2026 first-launch target, following a Stage 1 tank qualification-test rupture that forced a schedule re-baseline and a renewed emphasis on structural repeatability, acceptance testing discipline, and production-process maturity.

SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare Program is priced and packaged differently than a traditional “secondary payload” slot on a large primary mission. In practice, it operates as a repeatable, catalog-style service: customers buy a defined amount of mass to a defined orbit class, follow a standardized integration flow, and share a mission with many other spacecraft. By February 2026, SpaceX’s published pricing makes it possible to estimate launch cost from the earliest architecture trades, while still leaving meaningful “unknowns” in the parts of the bill that depend on mission-unique needs such as deployment hardware, propulsion handling, special testing, schedule moves, and orbit changes after separation.

The trajectory of human spaceflight is defined by two monumental efforts to place humans on the lunar surface: the historic Apollo 11 mission of 1969 and the upcoming Artemis III mission. While separated by over five decades, these endeavors share the fundamental goal of traversing the void between Earth and the Moon. However, the motivations, technologies, and operational paradigms driving them differ substantially. Apollo 11was a singular achievement driven by geopolitical competition, a sprint to demonstrate technological supremacy. In contrast, Artemis III represents the initiation of a sustained deep space exploration program, leveraging international alliances and commercial integration to establish a permanent foothold.

Phantom Space Corporation is a U.S. space transportation and manufacturing company founded in 2019 by Jim Cantrelland Michael D’Angelo . Publicly, the company has presented itself as a builder of repeatable systems: rockets designed for steady production, satellite buses sized across a wide mass range, and service concepts intended to reduce the friction between payload completion and on-orbit operations. The official corporate address shown on Phantom’s website is in Tucson, Arizona. Phantom Space .

Getting a satellite into orbit used to require building one large enough to justify the cost of its own rocket. That's not a metaphor for anything. It was simply the economic reality of spaceflight from the late 1950s through most of the 1990s. Launch vehicles were expensive, propellant was expensive, range time at Kennedy Space Center or Baikonur was expensive, and only nation-states or major telecommunications companies could play the game. The idea that a university research team in Denmark or a five-person startup in San Francisco could buy a seat on a rocket heading to sun-synchronous orbit for a few hundred thousand dollars would have sounded like science fiction to the engineers who built the early satellite industry.

The idea of building things in orbit sounds like science fiction that quietly became science fact. Companies are already doing it, in small ways, on the International Space Station and aboard demonstration platforms launched specifically to test manufacturing in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit. And yet, despite years of research, substantial government investment, and a growing commercial space sector that has dramatically lowered the cost of reaching orbit, in-space manufacturing hasn't scaled. It hasn't even come close to the industrial vision that researchers and entrepreneurs have been sketching since the 1970s.

There's a certain poetry in how simple the concept is, even if the engineering is anything but. A solid rocket booster is essentially a large, controlled explosion bottled inside a metal or composite casing, pointed in one direction. Unlike liquid-fueled engines that draw from separate fuel and oxidizer tanks, solid rocket boosters carry everything pre-mixed and molded into a solid grain. You ignite them, they burn, and they push. Hard. You can't throttle them down mid-burn, and you can't turn them off. What you get is raw, reliable, ferocious thrust at exactly the moment you need it most.

The story of ZBLAN is, in a sense, the story of a material that has been on the verge of changing the world for fifty years and hasn't quite gotten there yet. That's not a dismissal. The science is real, the experiments have produced genuine results, and the interest from governments, defense agencies, and telecommunications companies is not manufactured enthusiasm. But there's a substantial distance between a remarkable experiment aboard the International Space Station and a supply chain capable of replacing the fiber optic cables running along the floors of every ocean on Earth. That distance is where the hype and the reality diverge most sharply.

Flawless Photonics built its identity around a single stubborn fact of materials science: some specialty glasses behave better when gravity stops interfering with how they melt, mix, and solidify. The company’s flagship product name, SpaceFiber, points straight at the environment it wants to industrialize, not a conventional factory floor but the microgravity conditions of Low Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS).