Rocket Report: Starship launch delayed, German launch company may aid Canada

Welcome to Edition 8.42 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX nearly launched its Starship rocket on Thursday amid much pomp and circumstance in South Texas, only to be foiled by a ground system issue. Such delays are to be expected, with almost entirely new hardware on both the rocket and the ground side of things. The company will try again as soon as Friday evening, and as we discuss in this week’s report, the stakes are quite high for SpaceX and much of the rest of the US spaceflight enterprise.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly expands Central Texas footprint. Firefly Aerospace on Tuesday announced that it has moved into a new headquarters, expanded its cleanroom space, and added an innovation lab to support its growing workforce and accelerate spacecraft production. The expansion includes two new buildings adjacent to Firefly’s existing spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, Texas, enabling a single campus with 144,000 total square feet for spacecraft assembly and testing, mission control, avionics and component production, engineering, and business operations.

Everything’s bigger in Texas … The new campus is twice the size of Firefly’s former Cedar Park facilities and is less than 30 miles from Firefly’s 200-acre Rocket Ranch in Briggs, Texas, where the company operates six test stands and 217,000 square feet of facilities for launch vehicle engineering, manufacturing, and integration. The overall goal is to move from developing space vehicles to producing them at scale.

Isar may assist Canadian launch firms. European Spaceflight attempts to make sense of news this week that a German submarine company has partnered with a German launch company, Isar Aerospace, to sell 12 new submarines to Canada. Confused yet? The German maritime defense company TKMS is competing with South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean for the submarine contract, and final bids were due in March. Beyond finances, the competitors are looking for ways to sweeten their proposals. After submitting its bid, TKMS said it had partnered with German launch services provider Isar Aerospace to help establish sovereign Canadian access to space.

Isar probably will help, rather than compete … In recent months Canada has gotten serious about developing its own sovereign access to space. As part of its Launch the North initiative, Canada will invest $105 million over three years to establish a small-lift launch capability by the end of 2028. The initial awards included $8.3 million for Reaction Dynamics, the Canada Rocket Company, and NordSpace. The submarine proposal appears to be not an effort to supplant those three companies, but rather envisions Isar’s role as an industrial and technical enabler of the Canadian efforts.

Another Chinese launch firm raises funding. China’s Zenk Space has secured 180 million yuan ($26 million) ahead of the planned June debut of its Zhihang-1 kerolox rocket, the company’s first orbital launch attempt, Space News reports. The funding will provide solid financial backing for the Zhihang-1 inaugural mission and ensure all pre-launch activities proceed smoothly, the company said. The launch could take place in June.

Rocket leverages existing technology … Zhihang-1 is a 49.8-meter-long, 3.35-m-diameter, kerosene-liquid oxygen launcher capable of 4,000 kilograms to a 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit. The rocket uses YF-102 kerosene-liquid oxygen engines purchased from state-owned CASC’s Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology. CAS Space’s Kinetica-1 and Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-2 also use the YF-102. Propellant tanks are sourced from commercial firm R-Space.

SpaceX files financial document ahead of IPO. After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, SpaceX submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12, Ars reports.

From money winner to money loser … The document revealed no major surprises about the company’s space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk’s xAI, social media and AI. The company reported revenues of $18.67 billion in 2025, up significantly from $14.02 billion the year before. However, after turning a small profit in 2024, the company lost $4.94 billion in 2025 largely due to spending on artificial intelligence development.

Roscosmos begins rocket advertising in earnest. Since January 1, Russian rockets have been regularly plastered with advertising for banks, restaurants, and more, Ars reports. Last fall, President Vladimir Putin, who has served in that role for all but four years this century, approved changes to federal laws governing advertising and space activities to allow for the placement of advertising on spacecraft.

Marginal gains so far … Six large advertisements have been placed on Russian rockets in 2026. These include ads for PSB Bank, the Kofemaniya restaurant chain, the Russian Media Group, and the Russian Olympic Committee. The other two were public service announcements. The policy change is intended to offset Roscosmos’ losses in recent years, which have mounted after the onset of Western sanctions. However, annual revenues from space advertising may only amount to a few million dollars per year.

Ground system issue scrubs Starship test flight. SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day, Ars reports. Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

A fix to be attempted … That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, attributed the scrub to a hydraulic pin that failed to retract on an umbilical arm connecting the launch tower to the rocket. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow,” Musk wrote on X. The 90-minute launch window Friday would open at 5:30 pm CDT (22:30 UTC).

There is a lot on the line with this test flight of Starship. After seven months of down time, SpaceX returned its Starship vehicle to the launch pad. Only this time it’s a new rocket, V3 of the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster, and a new launch pad at its Starbase facility in South Texas. SpaceX’s goal with the test flight is to gather data about the performance of the radically remade new vehicle and its launch pad. For all that this is a test flight, however, in a preview of the launch, Ars reports that there is a lot on the line for SpaceX, NASA, and much of the US commercial space industry.

Time for Starship to fulfill its promises …  The US commercial space industry is depending on lower launch costs and higher capacity. NASA’s lunar ambitions with the Artemis program, to a great degree, hinge on its success. And the stakes are highest of all for SpaceX. Starlink direct-to-cell? Orbital data centers? SpaceX’s fantastic valuation after its IPO? An eventual city on Mars? All of these rely entirely on Starship fulfilling its promise of rapid, low-cost, reusable launch.