The Launch Industry Never Stops // July 1st, 2025

Hello, everybody. Welcome to tomorrow. It has been an interesting past couple of days in the rocket industry and the launch industry. Despite all of the uncertainty going on right now, the industry is marching right along or launching right along. Rocket Lab is continuing to make great progress. They launched two missions within 48 hours of each other from their launch complex in Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, from their first pad and their second pad, technically it's launch complex 1A and 1B. The first mission was Get the Hawk Out of Here for Hawkeye 360. That launched on Thursday, June 26th. And the other mission was Symphony of the Stars, which was launching for a confidential customer. But a lot of people suspect that it was EchoStar, unknown because it's a confidential customer. That launched on Saturday, June 28th. Despite only being their ninth and 10th missions of the year, this is still an impressive cadence for Rocket Lab. So congratulations to them for getting both of these missions off the ground. Also, we have a little bit of bittersweet news out of Japan. The 50th and final launch of their H2A rocket occurred on Saturday, June 28th of this year, 2025. So end of an era for the H2A. I know it's not a very good moniker. Like we didn't have a good, ever have a good nickname for that rocket, but it's been a workhorse for Japan for a long time. And the primary contractor for that is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. They've been the main launch provider for Japan for many, many years, but now we might see some sort of competition from Honda if they get serious about their rocket business. That would be amazing to see. In any case, Japan has their H3 rocket, which they have been launching already and is replacing the H2 series of rockets. So it's not like Japan is stranded right now. They have their own launch capabilities, but for this final mission, it was launching one of their GOSAT series, which is essentially a weather and meteorological satellite. On Sunday, June 29th, Blue Origin conducted another suborbital space tourism mission of their new Shepard rocket. This was the NS33 mission, launching six more space tourists to the edge of space. Well, it is technically space. It's past the Karmann line, but they're only getting a couple minutes of weightlessness. What was interesting about this one to me though, is how close the capsule landed next to the booster. The booster has its own landing site in their West Texas facility where they do their launches from. The booster landed successfully and then the capsule landed very, very close by. Almost to the point that myself and many, many others were questioning, is it even safe to go and recover the space tourists right now with how close that is to the booster, but apparently Blue Origin said that everything was fine and safe and they recovered those space tourists, no problem. So another successful mission. And it's actually the third mission in just a couple of months from Blue Origin for their new Shepard vehicle. So despite it only being a suborbital space tourism vehicle, it is good to see a little bit more cadence of that particular launch. So here's hoping that, uh, that happens soon with new Glenn. Definitely not this year, but, uh, who knows? Maybe soon. Now we have a weird one because Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems tested a version of their five segment solid rocket booster that previously was used for the space shuttle and now is being used for the space launch system. And this is their next generation of the solid rocket booster called Bull. Bull stands for booster obsolescence and life extension. Not a very good name. They did a static fire test of this particular booster on the ground. And at the end of the test, there was visible debris that came out of the nozzle. Activate after loose. Activated. Whoa. T plus 110 seconds. Activate for Duluth. So, uh, not exactly a perfect test. And the whole thing with this is this bowl, this next generation five segment solid rocket booster is meant for the SLS after Artemis nine and Congress and the white house are talking about potentially canceling SLS entirely after Artemis three. So it kind of seems, well, it's already in the name obsolete to do this test, but I don't know. Good for them. I guess they have not been having a good year with the Cygnus vehicle having damage on the way to the launch site and not being usable. And shoot, even last year with their October launch on the Vulcan rocket with, with different solid rocket boosters. These are the gem 63 XL solid rocket boosters that are used for the Vulcan rocket had that nozzle that came off during the launch, but somehow they were able to still have mission success with it. So I don't know what you guys think about this, but it seems to me like the people who originally made this solid rocket booster for the space shuttle and even for the SLS, the company has changed hands too many times with Thiokol and orbital ATK after, well, first Thiokol, then ATK, then orbital ATK, and now Northrop Grumman innovation systems. So maybe I'm wrong, but it just feels like the talent behind that has either retired or left the company when mergers happened. I don't know. What do you guys think about it? What is going on with their solid rocket department? Because they seem to be having issues in any case, here's a handful of upcoming missions over the next couple of days that I'm excited about. We have a progress resupply vehicle that should be launching on Thursday. If everything goes well and nothing particularly interesting about this, as far as the spacecraft and its mission, it's just a standard cargo resupply mission. Although this one is using one of the ports on the Russian segment of the international space station that isn't leaking. So we shouldn't have to worry about any issues with that. And the previous progress vehicle that was on that docking port should actually be undocking today and might've already undocked already by the time that you see this video. What's interesting to me about this is the Soyuz rocket that it's launching on. You'll notice that it has a different paint job than the regular Soyuz rockets, at least in this current generation. And it's because this was meant for the Glavcosmos commercial launches. These commercial missions were initially intended for rideshare missions with a whole bunch of satellites launching all together, similar to the SpaceX transporter missions. But a lot of those have dried up since the war started with Ukraine. They're still launching stuff, but mainly for like Russian universities and other Russian companies that have kind of popped up, kind of, sort of it's, it's, so it's a weird thing we don't have time to get into now, but what I want to know about this particular rocket is if this is one of the ones that was always intended to launch from Kazakhstan or Plesetsk or is it one of the ones that was supposed to launch from French Guiana, the Soyuz ST, which was supposed to be a special Soyuz that was specifically designed to be able to launch from those near equatorial conditions at the French Guiana launch sites, just north of Brazil. And if it is one of those versions, was all of that just kind of smoke and mirrors about it being a specially designed Soyuz or was it a regular Soyuz all along that can just launch from anywhere? So if you know the answer to that, please let me know in the comments. Anyway, mildly interesting to me, but something that might be a bit more interesting to everybody else is the Australian company, Gilmore Space might be launching their Ares rocket for the first time this week. Right now they have a no earlier launch date than July 3rd and hopefully everything goes well and they are able to actually launch this time. They have all of the permits and authorities that they need, permissions that they need from the Australian government. They had their a snafu a little while ago where the payload fairing deployed during ground tests out of nowhere. It looks like they got that replaced and are ready to go again. So at this point they're essentially tracking weather and making sure that all of their ground operations are going well. That might happen this week. There's still a chance it could be delayed and that other things will happen. But I think that we all can agree that we're rooting for them and would love to see another company be able to have their own capabilities, especially for the first time in Australia. Since the old boom era test site state that was always for like the British rockets. And I believe there was a handful of French rockets that launched from there, but nothing that was actually like from Australia or was part of Australia's industry. So this would be a first for Australia and definitely rooting for him. Despite everything that's going on with SpaceX dominating the market for the past several years, we do need more launchers. So I'm rooting for him. I hope you are too. You know, there's so much going on in the space industry and the launch industry all of the time. And here we are now, it is July 1st, 2025. So I figure that next I am going to do a little bit of a rundown just to kind of check in and see where we are now in 2025 and what the stats are and what the rest of the year looks like as far as predictions and upcoming missions to look forward to. So, you know, let's do a little bit of a check-in to see where we're at now. We're at the halfway point for 2025 past it already. Actually, if you enjoyed this little launch industry update, be sure to hit that like button subscribe. If you haven't already and hit the bell so that you're notified whenever we upload a new video and also consider becoming a member to help support us making more videos like this and to get access to exclusive content. Thank you very much for watching. My name is Space Mike. And until the next time I see you guys keep moving onwards and upwards and don't forget add Astra to the stars.