Rocket Report: SpaceX abandons catching fairings, ULA bets on upper stages - Ars Technica

These include interesting developments on the international front, from the closure of a Russian space tourism company to some fairly serious ethical issues surrounding development of a spaceport in Brazil.

Not bad for a company that has yet to launch a rocket.

The coastal cities of Ningbo and Wenchang are planning construction of new commercial spaceports to meet growing demand for launch in China.

Wenchang, China's coastal launch center developed for large, new-generation Long March 5 and Long March 7 rockets, is also backing the construction of an "integrated and open" launch center to meet commercial launch demand.

China currently has inland launch sites at Jiuquan in the northwest, Taiyuan in the north, and Xichang in the southwest of the country as well as the new coastal Wenchang center on the southern island of Hainan.

The Virginia-based nuclear technology company said NASA provided a one-year contract worth $9.4 million to produce fuel kernels, design materials, and manufacturing processes for fuel assemblies.

Russian space tourism company closes.

First, there just isn't much of a support network for commercial space in Russia.

And second, breaking into space tourism is extraordinarily difficult and costly.

The atmospheric re-entry and breakup of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket upper stage created a fiery display in the skies above the Pacific Northwest in late March, but not all of those shooting stars burned up on the way down.

"The sheriff's office checked it out on Monday, and SpaceX staff came over on Tuesday and retrieved it," Foreman said.

SpaceX has yet to detail precisely what went wrong with the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage, such that it failed to de-orbit in a controlled manner over the ocean.

The Brazilian government is committed to further developing the Alcântara Launch Center on the country's north Atlantic coast, near the equator.

Over the last couple of years, SpaceX has experimented with two ships with large nets, Ms.

After a lull in launches from America's primary West Coast rocket base, SpaceX is set to resume a regular cadence of missions from Vandenberg Air Force Base as soon as July to deploy Starlink Internet satellites into polar orbits, Spaceflight Now reports.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, said Tuesday that the company plans to start launching more Starlink satellites into polar orbit this summer.

Officials said SpaceX could ramp up to a cadence of launching one Starlink mission per month from the California launch base overlooking the Pacific Ocean some 225 kilometers northwest of Los Angeles.

Speaking on Wednesday at the America's Future Series space innovation summit, ULA chief Tory Bruno says the next big thing for his company is long-endurance upper stages, and he believes the technology has a bright future.

"We think it's going to be really all about that through-space transportation and the things that upper stages can do," Bruno said, according to SpaceNews.

The company's new Vulcan rocket will be powered by the Centaur V upper stage, which has 40 percent more endurance and 2.5 times more energy than the upper stage ULA currently flies.

The Centaur V is an impressive upper stage, but it is nonetheless a step back in ambition from the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES, that the company first envisioned using with Vulcan.

ULA says the Centaur V upper stage has "fingerprints" from research done on ACES.

April 18: GSLV | The GISAT 1 geoimaging satellite | Satish Dhawan Space Center, India | TBD

April 22: Falcon 9 | Crew-2 mission on Crew Dragon | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 10:11 UTC