The last quarter of 2026 is ahead
The summer break is now over and it’s back to more coverage of spaceflight, computers and basically everything I like to talk about. I’ve decided that I will now cover mostly spaceflight and artificial intelligence since these are two of the hottest sectors right now.
The big one: Starship
At the time of writing this, Starship is mere hours away from what could be its first orbital flight. No catch planned for this one, but if everything goes to plan, we should see some sort of catch involving either the Super Heavy booster or the Starship upper stage in 2026 still. We are also expecting one launch (possibly the final Starship launch of the year) to lift off from the brand new Starship LC-39A pad at Cape Canaveral, FL. Starship Super Heavy is a very ambitious rocket that I love to talk about because it feels like what every rocket in spaceflight should strive to do; push their limit to the max. I won’t go any further on Starship today, but you can expect a couple blog posts on that beast.
Falcon 9 galore?
Well no, not really. Falcon 9 still launches so often that it’s become boring but with the retirement of Falcon 9 launches from LC-39A and the retirement of Starlink launches from the Cape altogether, the 70m tall reusable rocket is not lifting off as much as it used to. Of course this is on purpose because SpaceX thinks they can up their cadence of Starship launches, so they don’t have two very active, very different rockets at once. This move makes sense but it requires a pretty big leap of faith in the Starbase team. So sadly, Falcon 9 just won’t be launching as often now, nine years after it started getting reused.
What about everybody else?
A few weeks ago, ISAR Aerospace finally had its second ever launch which successfully put a payload into orbit. As impressive as this flight, ISAR is a little late on schedule at the moment - basically like every other rocket company - but they are indeed aiming for a third flight of Spectrum in this last quarter. Best of luck to them, because they may just become one of the most important players in the European continent a couple years from now, who knows?
Talking about big European players, Arianespace is aiming for three launches before 2027, one of which is an Ariane 64 launch for the Amazon Leo constellation. This would bring the total Ariane 6 launches in 2026 to seven. Not bad considering it had its first launch in 2024, but definitely not enough to make a significant impact on the market. Ariane 6 is still just THAT option you can pick for your satellite, but you’re probably going to pick Falcon 9 anyways unless you have a grudge against SpaceX. I’ll probably write another blog post for Ariane 6 in a bit, because some interesting news regarding their possible future cadence has come out this summer that I’d love to discuss here.
Of course, as always there are still plenty of different kinds of rockets launching before the end of the year, I may not write about most of them but if something important happens with one of them, I’ll probably take a look.
As much as I’d love for all these “4th quarter” launches to happen, most of them will probably succumb to Berger’s Law which states that if your rocket is meant to either have its first launch, or an important launch in the 4th quarter, it’s going to get pushed back to the next year. Only time will tell which will fall to that fate.
The next blog post will probably cover AI as I started following the sector very closely this year and I have a lot of things I’d love to write about.
ps: I only now realized Starliner is also meant to launch again in 2026, wow.