Enlarge / A discolored plume of exhaust was visible beneath the Super Heavy booster's Raptor engines on the Starship rocket's April 20 test flight, a likely indication of a propellant leak or fire in the engine compartment. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images )

The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday it has closed an investigation into the problems SpaceX encountered on its first full-scale Starship test launch in April, but federal regulators won't yet give a green light for the next Starship flight.

"The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica," the FAA said in a statement, referring to the location of SpaceX's Starship launch facility at Boca Chica Beach in South Texas.

The nearly 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, the largest ever built, is standing on its launch pad in Texas for the upcoming test flight, which could happen before the end of this month, pending FAA approval.

Enlarge / A Japanese H-IIA rocket lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center with an X-ray astronomy satellite and a robotic Moon lander. (credit: Photo by STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images )

Welcome to Edition 6.10 of the Rocket Report! A Japanese spacecraft has joined the international flock of missions traveling to the Moon this year, but you'll need to practice patience on this one. It will take about four months for Japan's small lander to get into lunar orbit, then more weeks to align with the mission's target landing site. We're crossing our fingers this lander will see the same success as India's Chandrayaan 3 mission.

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.

India launches its first solar research satellite . Less than two weeks after landing its first mission on the Moon, India launched a solar observatory on September 2 toward an orbit nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth around the L1 Lagrange point. This mission, named Aditya-L1, lifted off on India's workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and entered orbit around the Earth, where the spacecraft is expected to perform five maneuvers to escape Earth's gravity and head to its distant observation post.

Enlarge / Chris Kemp, founder and CEO of Astra. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

Chris Kemp is a fighter. That's the price of admission if you want to compete in the brutal small launch industry. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Astra, founded in 2016 with a goal of essentially commoditizing small satellite launch services, or at least getting a lot closer to that than anyone else.

But there are a lot pressure points for Astra in 2023. The company abandoned its first orbital rocket design, called Rocket 3, last year after a string of failures. With higher interest rates, raising money in 2023 isn't as easy as it was a few years ago. And calling Astra's competition stiff is definitely an understatement.

Kemp argues that Astra finds itself in a different position than, say, Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch company that went bankrupt earlier this year. Astra has diversified, and can lean on a separate source of revenue in a promising business building electric thrusters for small satellites. This business, which Astra calls spacecraft engines, was made possible by the acquisition of a company called Apollo Fusion in 2021.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship rocket lost control a few minutes after launch from South Texas on April 20. (credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images )

The Federal Aviation Administration is now reviewing a mishap investigation report submitted by SpaceX regarding the company's April test flight of its giant Starship rocket, a spokesperson for the regulatory agency said Tuesday.

The milestone is noteworthy because it signals SpaceX has completed its investigation into the Starship test launch on April 20 , which ended about four minutes after liftoff following engine failures and other problems during ascent. Now comes the FAA's review of SpaceX's investigation, fulfilling the agency's role as the regulator charged with ensuring public safety during commercial launch operations.

"When a final mishap report is approved, it will identify the corrective actions SpaceX must make," an FAA spokesperson told Ars. "Separately, SpaceX must modify its license to incorporate those actions before receiving authorization to launch again.

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket, seen here in its "501" configuration without any solid rocket boosters. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Amazon has confirmed it now plans to launch the first two test satellites for the company's Kuiper broadband network on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as soon as next month, shifting the payloads off of the inaugural flight of ULA's new Vulcan rocket.

The shift has been rumored for several weeks after ULA delayed the first flight of its Vulcan rocket from the summer until the fourth quarter of the year. The delay will allow time for ULA to beef up the structure of the Vulcan upper stage's liquid hydrogen tank , which sprung a leak that resulted in a destructive fireball on a test stand in March.

The first Vulcan rocket was slated to launch the first two prototype satellites for Amazon's Kuiper constellation, a network of more than 3,200 broadband satellites that the retail and tech giant plans to deploy over the next few years. The Kuiper network is similar to SpaceX's Starlink "mega-constellation," which already has more than 4,000 satellites in orbit.

Enlarge / A Zhuque-2 rocket developed by the Chinese company LandSpace lifts off from its launch pad late Tuesday (US time). (credit: LandSpace )

A commercial Chinese firm named LandSpace launched its Zhuque-2 rocket late Tuesday and made history as the first company to send a methane-fueled launcher into orbit, beating a bevy of US vehicles to the milestone.

LandSpace launched the Zhuque-2 rocket at 9 pm ET Tuesday (01:00 UTC Wednesday) from the Jiuquan spaceport, a military-run facility in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China. The company called the launch a success in a press release, and publicly available US military tracking data confirmed the rocket reached an orbit at an average altitude of about 280 miles (450 kilometers).

“The flight mission was completed according to the procedure, and the launch mission was a complete success,” LandSpace said. “The (Zhuque-2) rocket is the world's first liquid oxygen methane rocket that successfully entered orbit, and it is also the first launch vehicle in domestic civil and commercial aerospace to successfully enter orbit based on a self-developed liquid engine.”

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket streaks into the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission Sunday night to deploy 22 more Starlink internet satellites. (credit: SpaceX )

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December.

Sunday night’s mission got the booster’s extended life off to a good start.