Chinese rocket startup Deep Blue narrowly misses a successful landing of their Nebula-1 rocket a few days ago. Read more here.
Isar Aerospace out of Germany prepares for its first launch. CEO Daniel Metzler sets expectaions low.
Firefly wins contract to launch NOAA satellite in 2026. Firefly's first VADR contract.
SpaceX launches their rescue mission. The preiviously stranded austronauts have a way home.
This news site is dedicated primarily to weekly updates on the space industry, the focus is on government and private oragnizations in various countries. The columns here will provide history and opinon about the historical period I'm referring to as the Neo Space Race, starting with how I believe it began.
The first noteworthy event in the Neo Space Race was the advent of private companies. Specifically private companies looking to emulate their govenment counterparts, launching rockets and pursuing their own objectives. The intial one being SpaceX. There's a decent build up to the founding of the company; the period after Elon Musk was outed from PayPal up to the founding of SpaceX he had a growing intrest in space. He felt that humans should be an interplanetary species and funded projects and organizations like the Mars Society to further that goal. As an interesting aside, the early history of rocketry is riddled with privately formed interplanetary societies, von Braun had even been part of one in the early 1930's. Many countries had one or more of these groups operating.
The creation of what would become the US governments premier space agency was initially a ragtag group of aeroplane researchers looking to further fund and legitimize their field. NACA(later renamed NASA) was founded in 1915 and was part of the trend of that age(The Progressive Era) to have the government more directly fund and develope science and military technology. In the 21st century the idea of the govenrment being a bastion of competence and progress is long dead and private actors are once again taking on the task of pushing humanity into and through the unknown. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has continued to be the leading organization in private space flight. However that does not a spcae race make, the race itself began not with SpaceX but in response to it. Well, in truth Scaled Composites was not neccesarily built to compete with SpaceX but they are viewed as it's earliest competitor. As early as 2004 Scaled Composites had successfully launched a rocket of its own. This is where I will maintain that the Neo_Space Race began.