Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback
Welcome to Rocket Report 8.26! The past week has been marked by advances and setbacks in the rocket industry. NASA wheeled the massive Artemis II mission rocket toward its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launch vehicles suffered back-to-back failures in the space of about 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward launching its new Neutron launcher in the coming months could be stalled after a failure in a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week’s Rocket Report.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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-range rockets, as well as a quick look at the next three launches on the schedule.
Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured A$217 million ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s new unicorn.—a fast-growing startup valued at over $1 billion—and one of the most backed private technology companies in the country businesses.
Local rocket… “We are a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first time I’ve gotten a decent amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on foreign launch providers.—mainly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—to put government, defense and commercial satellites into orbit. As US launch queues stretch more than two years and geopolitical tensions reshape access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket lifted off from the Bowen orbital spaceport in north Queensland on July 30 last year. It achieved 14 seconds of flight before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour described as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.
