The most attention-grabbing catalyst is the return of ticket sales. Virgin Galactic has resumed selling reservations for its upcoming commercial spaceflights, with seats now priced at $750,000 each. This marks a significant price increase from earlier reservation tiers and signals confidence that the company's Delta-class spacecraft will be ready to deliver on that premium.
I'm grateful for folks like Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson that have put their resources on the line for a capability for the good of all humankind right now.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is set to launch 25 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base to low-Earth orbit at 10:16 p.m. Monday, according to a post by the company. The launch will stream live on SpaceX's website and X account, starting five minutes before launch time.
The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week.