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SpaceX aborts two rocket launches in a row! For the first time in what feels like forever; SpaceX, the company that launched 165 times last year, aborted two different launches in a row. First with Starship on the 16th and second with a standard Starlink Falcon 9 mission on the 20th. Sometimes, luck just isn’t on your side. Best of luck to them to get these rockets back in working order.

China’s Long March 10B becomes the second rocket to ever get ‘caught’! The agency’s bet on a flexible cable-net recovery method has proved successful as the rocket’s first stage seems to be intact after being caught. It is not known what CASC/CALT will do with this vehicle. Congrats! :)

NASA announces the crew for the Artemis III mission! The four astronauts that will test both HLS landers in LEO are Commander Randy Bresnik, Italian Pilot Luca Parmitano from ESA as well as Mission specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas. Congratulations to them and godspeed Artemis III!

French astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Arnaud Prost have both been announced to partake in different Vast missions! The first will take Pesquet and three others to the ISS while the second will be Vast’s first mission for their Haven-1 space station concept.

Blue Origin loses their only launch pad! On May 28th, at 9pm ET, the New Glenn booster named “No, it’s necessary” experienced an ‘anomaly’ (boom) while attempting a static-fire at pad LC-36C. The majority of pad infrastructure appears to be heavily damaged, most beyond repair. The consequences for Blue Origin are immense are this essentially grounds the whole company for at least a year.

Starship flight 12 is successful! The 124m tall rocket lifted off yesterday at 5:30pm CT carrying 22 mock satellites or about 44 tons to almost-LEO. This is the heaviest payload since Skylab. (not counting space shuttle like vehicles) Despite a few engines failing and a botched boostback burn for booster 19, Starship 39 splashed down successfully in the indian ocean, paving the way for Starship to potentially start orbital flights and more in just a few months.

Starship flight 12 is nearing! The next generation of Starship is launching as early as May 21st, 7:30pm CT. This launch will be the first V3 launch from the second launchpad at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in Texas.

Ariane 64 launches for a second time in two months! The European heavy-lift launcher delivered 32 Amazon LEO satellites in low earth orbit. Most notably, this marks the second launch of this configuration of Ariane 6 in only two months. Turnaround times are everything in spaceflight and the launch cadence over at Arianespace is finally starting to show itself.

Falcon Heavy returns! After a 18 month hiatus, the big brother of the Falcon family lifted off Wednesday morning carrying the third ViaSat-3 satellite; completing the company’s constellation.

New Glenn flight 3 fails! On Sunday morning, the third ever orbital launch from Blue Origin lifted off pad LC-36 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Impressively, the first stage booster Never Tell Me The Odds stuck the landing on LPV1 aka Jacklyn. However, the second stage, powered by two BE-3U engines, seems to have encoutered some sort of failure during one of its follow-up burns, failing to get the BlueBird satellite to a high enough altitude.