Rocket Report: Starship launch delayed, German launch company may aid Canada
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Shenzhou-23 will probably have a crew member who spends a year in space. Pakistan have 2 astronaut candidates training for a short duration flight, expected to be flying up on Shenzhou-24 (and back down on 23).
We don't yet know who it will be, as CMSA usually only publicly announce the crew a day before launch.
We don't yet know who it will be, as CMSA usually only publicly announce the crew a day before launch.
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This Week's Additional Launches
OK, Eric updated the Next Three Launches list since the E-mail came out yesterday, to reflect the fact that Starship Flight 12 has been rescheduled for this evening. That means we have only three additional launches scheduled for this week, two Starlinks and an unknown payload out of China, which they will probably identify once it is safely in orbit.
May 25 | 11:41 UTC: Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-47 | SLC-40, Cape Canaveral SFS, Florida
May 26 | 16:15 UTC: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | LC-201, Wenchang Space Launch Site, China
May 28 | 14:00 UTC: Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 17-41 | SLC-4E, Vandenberg SFB, California
OK, Eric updated the Next Three Launches list since the E-mail came out yesterday, to reflect the fact that Starship Flight 12 has been rescheduled for this evening. That means we have only three additional launches scheduled for this week, two Starlinks and an unknown payload out of China, which they will probably identify once it is safely in orbit.
May 25 | 11:41 UTC: Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-47 | SLC-40, Cape Canaveral SFS, Florida
May 26 | 16:15 UTC: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | LC-201, Wenchang Space Launch Site, China
May 28 | 14:00 UTC: Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 17-41 | SLC-4E, Vandenberg SFB, California
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It really bothered me that there was absolutely no information released by SpaceX about the worker who died. The lack of transparency reminds me of the kind of over-the-top media management employed by Disneyland, which aims to prevent any perception of danger or risk at their facility. Working with rockets IS dangerous and SpaceX has had seven OSHA violations in the past year. That Texas essentially gave SpaceX all the rights of a city without citizen oversight is appalling.
Anyhoo, here are the ACTUAL details.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/19/texas-spacex-death-prompts-osha-investigation/
Jose Luis Bautista. Kid was 25, and fell eight feet to his death from a scaffolding. Something that simple should be a no-brainer to report, at least after the family was informed. IMO, if you're up on scaffolding, that implies long-term work (painting, construction, etc.) on an exterior and should require headwear and/or a tether. But what do I know?
Anyhoo, here are the ACTUAL details.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/19/texas-spacex-death-prompts-osha-investigation/
Jose Luis Bautista. Kid was 25, and fell eight feet to his death from a scaffolding. Something that simple should be a no-brainer to report, at least after the family was informed. IMO, if you're up on scaffolding, that implies long-term work (painting, construction, etc.) on an exterior and should require headwear and/or a tether. But what do I know?
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Possible failure modes:
Electrical (limit switch, broken wire/pin/cannon plug, etc.) Easy fix.
Hydraulic (leak, pump, etc.) Not as easy, but still doable for launch today.
Pressure on the pin (something is physically preventing the pin from retracting.) Could be movement from vehicle or GSE, etc. Hard to fix, something wasn’t calculated correctly (new vehicle, GSE, etc.), the pin did its job to prevent movement and now they gotta figure out why it’s stuck.
Others?
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While I also don't like SpaceX being so totally silent about that, it seems this was construction work on the GigaBay by a contractor, not working with rockets. Construction work often is dangerous.
There's also no need to post his name just to make a point. When NASA didn't want to publish any details about the health problems that forced them return an ISS crew earlier everyone was about "this is private data" and now people are insisting in details and even are posting names and family details. At least let's apply the same criteria with such things.
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Whatever it was it seems they have fixed it since they're going to try again today.
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A couple of points:
25 years old is a grown-ass man, not a kid.
The “ACTUAL” details contains very few details. Did he have fall protection on? Did said fall protection fail to work? Was he wearing it properly? Was it adjusted for the height he was working from? Etc, etc. So, let’s let the investigation work it out and then cast aspersions.
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Very cool to have Isar involved in Canadian launch. But first I am really eager to see their second attempt at orbital from Norway. Anybody got some updates on that?
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Thanks for the update. All OSHA regs, no matter how will they seem, are written in blood. This was probably preventable, and someone will be fined for this for sure. We can argue whether 5 figure fines for a death are a proper deterrent or not.
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In other news, Rocket Lab filed plans for an up-to-$3 billion capital raise on Wednesday, to add to the $2 billion they already have in liquidity. They've stated that the previous capital raise was meant to prepare them for M&A opportunities.
What company(ies) could they be looking to purchase? ULA perhaps? Maybe they could give that dinosaur the Rocket Lab treatment and put it on a path toward more consistent execution.
What company(ies) could they be looking to purchase? ULA perhaps? Maybe they could give that dinosaur the Rocket Lab treatment and put it on a path toward more consistent execution.
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Those crazy kids at NASA Spaceflight are already live with today's Starship Stakeout stream.
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Maybe not enough mechanical advantage for the electrical or hydraulic mechanism that retracts the pin -- something that a squirt of oil would fix for now, but worth a redesign before the next launch.
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I can see a rationale for Rocket Lab buying ULA. They’d get the launch complexes at the Cape and Vandy along with manufacturing facilities in Alabama and engineering/test facilities in Colorado — plus all the Congressional influence that comes with them. Vulcan would round out their launch services at the medium-to-heavy end.
But there’s a lot of downside to the acquisition too. How clean is the break with Boeing/Lockheed, for example. Would RL own ULA’s patent portfolio free and clear or will it be a tangled mess? There’s the cultural issue too. ULA employs as many people as RL. Merging the two might speed up the ULA culture while ossifying the RL culture (or worse, you get a Boeing-McDonnell style reverse takeover).
In the end, my armchair analyst guess is that Beck prefers smaller, more focused acquisitions that round out RL’s capabilities and won’t swing for the fences on a ULA buy.
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Was appropriate hard hat etc. available? Had he heeded safety instructions? I wouldn't expect an eight foot fall to be fatal. Did he fall onto something (metal stake, scrap, a tool he was holding...)?
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An awkward 8 ft fall is plenty enough to break your neck or back, or cause cerebral hemorrhage or something like that. A hard hat wouldn't help much: it'll help keep your skull intact, but won't do much else. Shit happens at construction sites, but the safest way is to simply avoid falling through consistent and disciplined use of (personal fall arrest system) tethering.
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Jump to conclusions much? As others have said, let the investigation come out before making comments on the particulars we know nothing about. We're smart people, we don't need to participate in a court of public opinion with no facts.
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I know I shouldn't be so thin-skinned, but this kind of aggressive response is what irritates me about the way Ars seems to like its community.
I'm older than 90% of you, I'm sure, and I have two sons that are older than 25. I also realize that young men--yes, I know he's a "grown man"--in their 20's are still learning adulting. Lots of them are so eager to prove themselves at a job, or they're so careless, that they make mistakes, sometimes fatal. I called him a "kid" because feel for his family, as a parent. Someone older, and more responsible, should check to make sure the guys working on scaffolding (imo) are trying to be safe. Maybe it was done here, I don't know, but I was really bothered by how callous SpaceX's non-response feels. This was a full week ago. Even a statement like, "SpaceX takes such incidents seriously and will conduct a full investigation. Our sympathies are with his family" would have been better than what I've seen so far.
And as for reporting the name, I was at least trying to humanize him. The article is a legitimate news source who, I'm going to have to assume, would only have released his name after either having seen it in other publications or having been supplied the information from the family, would have felt they had license to. The anonymity of a death bothered me.
I did look up OSHA regs and headgear is usually required on scaffolding with objects above, but also (at least recommended) on heights over 10 feet. Tethers are also recommended on scaffolding, and required if the scaffolding had no rails. It obviously behooves SpaceX to keep a lid on the details until they're 100% sure it was the individual's fault, and likely it was. People do stupid things when they hurry. But their silence, and the fact that they are their own police, concerns me.
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/1993-11-10
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.451 specifically 1926.451(g)
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Not a lot about OSHA standards, it appears. 8 feet doesn't require a tether. Headgear depends on whether there's overhead falling hazards. Nothing is going to help you if you land on your head from eight feet up anyhow. So your opinion isn't really valid.
For the record, ANY on the job death prompts an OSHA investigation. And OSHA violations range from minor to shut them down. Since they're not shut down, they were probably minor.
ETA re your reply above, I'm probably older than you. I know 25 year olds are not as thoughtful or careful as an old fuck like me, but you can't fix that. You can only deal with the consequences. Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. If you survive that bad judgement, that is.
This is why the 16-25 y/o drivers have the highest car insurance rates. They do things they shouldn't. Most of the time, it's not fatal. But in this case, unfortunately, it was.
And I expect that trend to continue. The whole data centers in space thing is going to bankrupt them, because Musk doesn't know how to run a company. And every time he gets too involved in one, it goes under.
IMHO, this does not bode well for American supremacy in space. But, then, given our administration, that's the whole point here.
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Software is also worth considering. The hardware is fine, the system just never got permission to move, because of a bug or a software safety interlock held it. Could be a real out-of-limit condition the software correctly caught, a bad parameter value (wrong config loaded, stale value from a prior vehicle), or a logic bug where a flag never cleared.
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At some point it feels like pearl clutching and attacking because it is SpaceX instead of legitimate concern. Not the least because at least ten people have died in construction accidents since then with similar silence from their employers. Silence while investigating is normal.
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gucci-on-fleek
Smack-Fu Master, in training
I guess that this ruins the joke about a shopping mall having more submarines than the Canadian government. (I can't post links yet, but Google "West Edmonton Mall submarines" for some more details)
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That's not the case, though, for me Netmage. I have no bone to pick with SpaceX and I greatly admire Shotwell. She and the folks at SpaceX have done some amazing things. For me, it's the lack of a third, neutral party to cross-check what they're doing. I have the same beef with Disney, as I mentioned above. Some folks hate regulation, but having a disinterested third party as an overseer and investigator means a self-interested party, like SpaceX, can't simply PR their way out of problems, or at least so I hope.
As FatesRider said above, in the end it really is about personal responsibility. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy was up there doing work without regard to safety. Guys do that. Accountability, yes, is a thing an we're all responsible for our own actions. I just hope that, contractor or no, SpaceX--soon to be valued over $2T--would bore into the brains of its workers, contractors, and managers that safety cannot be compromised. Accidents happen, but it's just sad when a preventable death occurs.
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I'll push back a bit and say that safety on a jobsite isn't a matter of personal responsibility - at least of the party involved in doing the work. It's the job of the foreperson and management to ensure proper safety procedures are both instituted and executed.
This ties very much into the changes in engineering curricula that were instituted after the Challenger accident. One assumes people will fail and try to create short-cuts or exert or suffer from political pressure. One then designs the system to be as impervious to those faults as possible. The same is true for design of safety systems and gear but at some level, automatic termination for failure to follow rules (for workers and forepersons alike) needs to follow.
I have no idea the circumstances around this contractor's death. I just want to push back on the idea that safety is somehow the responsibility of the technician with the wrench. They're just one part of a chain and should be assumed, by design, to be the weakest link.
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25 is not a kid, FYI. He had been an adult for 7 years.
Also it's SOP to withhold information about the victim for a while. Knowing their name is not relevant to you or to anyone other than his family or the company he worked for. As for your second question, scaffolding generally involves railings, so you don't have to wear a harness, although he probably should've been wearing a helmet regardless if he was doing construction work (vs something like painting). He may even have had a helmet on but just not had it strapped/buckled, and it may have fallen off during his fall. The article you linked provides no information other than that he fell from scaffolding and died from blunt force trauma, so we can't say one way or the other what the contributing factors were.
I will say as someone who is familiar with working at heights or on ropes, 8 feet is not particularly high; I can see a worker on 8 feet scaffolding thinking they are perfectly safe, at least from death or permanent injury, that close to the ground. That is a fallacy, of course, but I can certainly understand if that were a contributing factor.
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Agreed. The next acquisition will probably either be more vertical integration or a first step into services. If the business model is solid, they could consider acquiring Star Catcher. Rocket Lab's precision robotics and scale-optimized solar arrays and electric propulsion seem like a good complement to Star Catcher's power beaming tech
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It's Canada. That joke will remain relevant for at least another 10 years (I guess one wrinkle though is that those mall subs are long gone)
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Imagine that. Local municipalities having a pissing contest about jurisdiction. !shocked face!
For better or worse, Starbase is now its own municipality. The City of Brownsville doesn't have any jurisdiction. As noted, the Sherriff's office was investigating so clearly they weren't blocked. I'm pretty sure Brownsville would be equally pissed of Starbase sent its own police to its neighbor to resolve an issue without invitation.
Edit: Also, where are you getting the idea that emergency personnel were not allowed past the front gate? As per the WSJ article, a fire truck was called and cancelled before it rolled.
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Spacex announced during the starship streaming webcast last night that there will be a Private Mars Flyby: A prominent entrepreneur and cryptocurrency billionaire, Chun Wang, has announced plans to lead the first private crewed Starship flyby of Mars. Before flying around Mars, he is slated to participate in a circumlunar (Moon) mission aboard Starship.
They also talked about how SpaceX is preparing for uncrewed Starship missions to Mars, which will serve as precursors to human flyby operations. A private crewed Mars flyby mission is also in development, backed by a cryptocurrency billionaire. However, exact dates for these private crewed flyby missions are still being formalized.
They also talked about how SpaceX is preparing for uncrewed Starship missions to Mars, which will serve as precursors to human flyby operations. A private crewed Mars flyby mission is also in development, backed by a cryptocurrency billionaire. However, exact dates for these private crewed flyby missions are still being formalized.
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Is this before or after the previously-announced flyby of the moon?
This certainly falls into the category of "I'll believe it when I see it."
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
I think there is zero chance of ULA. RL has been expanding into other related markets (in space propulsion, satellites, power systems, communications, etc). They have been doing this by both diversifying internally and buying other space related companies. They are more a space services company than a pure launch provider. I would imagine any future purchases would be along that line.
RL sees themselves as a one stop shop. You just want a launch they got that. You want them to build the sat to your specs they can do that too. Maybe you have a sat design but want to purchase orbital thrusters for that sat from them that is an option. Design work, analysis, testing they can help with any of that as well. It can be as little or as much as you want.
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Canada Rocket Company's R2 sounds like a great idea - 6500kg to LEO orbit, with a reusable rocket - basically a scaled down Falcon 9.
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More info on space.com here: https://www.space.com/space-explora...spacexs-1st-private-starship-to-mars-but-when
At one point he said he would do the moon flyby first.
{edit: fixed link}
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I'm not saying that this is the case for Texas and Brownsville, but in some places, the Sheriff office is county based, not town or city based. So if a county has several cities, the county Sheriff has jurisdiction on all of them.
EDIT:
https://www.cameroncountytx.gov/county-sheriff-home/
The Sheriff is for Cameron County, the county that contains the cities of Brownsville and Starbase. So he has jurisdiction there.
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To put a little more information here Chun Wang was the organizer, backer, and mission commander for Fram2, the polar orbital expedition utilizing a Crew Dragon. He's been to space and while he is no Jared Isaacman he is clearly serious about funding further crewed missions.
But as usual, "We'll see."
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What does ULA have ro offer Rocket Lab? A Florida launch pad, two vertical integration buildings and an expendable rocket" RL would need vertical integration to load Neutron, they could use the launch pad, but they don't need an expendable rocket, they're building a semi-reusable rocket that can match most of Vulcan's profile.
What Rocket Lab has been acquiring have been satellite technology firms. They are as much in the satellite business as the launch business.
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But what does that have to do with 1Mike's comment that emergency personnel were "not allowed past the front gate?" I observed that the local Sherriff's office was mentioned as currently investigating the accident. So obviously Starbase opened the gates to them. As far as I can tell, the only issue is that someone improperly called the Brownsville Fire Department to answer this call when the correct thing to do was to dispatch something from Starbase. That puts the only concern on whoever made the erroneous dispatch.
The jurisdiction in this instance wasn't a matter of police but of fire rescue for health emergencies.
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I was actually making a reference to Maezawa's dearMoon flight.
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