Welcome to version 8.26 of Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advances and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA moved the giant rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within about 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward the debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have been halted after a failure during a key qualification test. We’ll 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-lift rockets, as well as a quick look at the next three launches on the calendar.
Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket rocketed past the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured A$217 million ($148 million) in funding, which 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 newest unicorn.—A fast-growing start-up worth more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most supported private technology Enterprise.
domestic rocket… “We’re a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first raise where I’ve actually raised a good amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on overseas launch providers—Mainly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—To place government, defense and commercial satellites in orbit. With US launch queues lasting more than two years and geopolitical tensions reshaping access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket was launched from Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland on July 30 last year. It flew for 14 seconds before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour viewed as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.
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