~4 minutes

TAMPA, Fla. — Kepler Communications plans to deploy next-generation optical relay satellites on Rocket Lab’s upcoming Neutron rocket in one of several launches the Canadian operator has slated for 2028.

The operator announced Aug. 10 it had booked its first dedicated launch mission for an undisclosed number of satellites as it prepares to ramp up optical connectivity, on-orbit compute and hosted payload capacity. Previous Kepler satellites have shared rides on rockets such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

“Securing our first dedicated launch reflects the next stage of growth,” Kepler chief revenue officer Beau Jarvis said in a statement.

“As we continue expanding our constellation to keep pace with growing customer demand, multiple launches in 2028 will increase capacity, strengthen resilience, and enable new services for customers around the world.”

Kepler deployed 10 satellites around 300 kilograms each for Tranche 1 of the network earlier this year, as part of the company’s shift away from providing connectivity for remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices with much smaller radio frequency spacecraft around 12 kilograms.

According to the company, the low Earth orbit (LEO) relay network has helped deliver 10-fold year-over-year revenue growth, while also serving as the foundation for a hosted payload business.

Disclosed hosted payload partners include German wildfire-detection company OroraTech, which has four thermal imaging payloads aboard Tranche 1 satellites. A Kepler spokesperson said OroraTech is also leveraging the operator’s orbital compute and data relay capabilities.

Whereas Kepler’s current optical relay service advertises data rates of up to 2.5 gigabits per second, the second tranche is designed to support up to 100 Gbps, while remaining compatible with the earlier generation.

Tranche 2 is also slated to include 10 satellites Kepler is developing for the first element of the European Space Agency’s HydRON program, which aims to demonstrate a multi-orbit, terabit-per-second transport system for extending the reach of terrestrial fiber networks.

Rocket Lab’s medium-lift Neutron rocket is designed to carry up to 13,000 kilograms to LEO in its reusable configeration, compared with around 300 kilograms for its Electron small launch workhorse.

The company plans to debut Neutron late this year after a first stage propellant tank ruptured during testing in January.

Multiple contracts have been announced for Neutron to date, including a confidential customer that booked five Neutron and three Electron launches in May for missions between 2026 and 2029, in what was then Rocket Lab’s largest launch contract.

In July, Rocket Lab announced a $266 million U.S. Space Force contract for up to 18 suborbital missions, which the company said marked its largest launch award to date.

3–4 minutes

Impulse Space's Mira spacecraft. Credit: Impulse Space

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The U.S. Space Force has added $28 million to an existing contract with Impulse Space to provide two more maneuverable spacecraft for tactically responsive space missions, expanding the startup’s role in an effort to give military operators faster options for responding to activity in orbit.

The contract modification will fund Victus Salo 2 and Victus Salo 3, which will use Impulse’s Mira spacecraft to host government-provided payloads for missions in low Earth orbit, according to the Space Force.

The award increases the value of the contract to about $62.8 million. The original $34.8 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase 3 agreement, awarded in 2024 by Space Systems Command’s Space Safari office in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit, covered the Victus Surgo and Victus Salo 1 missions.

Victus Salo is part of the Space Force’s broader Tactically Responsive Space, or TacRS, effort to shorten the time needed to deploy and operate spacecraft.

Under Victus Salo, the Space Force is moving beyond its earlier focus on rapid launch to also test spacecraft that can be positioned in orbit and maneuvered quickly when circumstances change. The first Victus Salo mission calls for a Mira vehicle to operate in low Earth orbit carrying a government payload supplied by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory.

Victus Salo 1 is currently expected to launch in 2027. Victus Surgo is more ambitious: an Impulse Helios high-energy kick stage is intended to carry another Mira spacecraft from low Earth orbit toward geosynchronous transfer orbit, where Mira would maneuver independently.

Mira is a high-thrust spacecraft that can host and deploy payloads and make relatively rapid orbital maneuvers using chemical propulsion. Impulse says the vehicle can carry payloads of up to 300 kilograms and uses eight thrusters burning nitrous oxide and ethane. The company has flown Mira on three missions.

Impulse, founded in 2021 by former SpaceX propulsion executive Tom Mueller, is building spacecraft and propulsion systems intended to provide transportation after a payload has separated from its launch vehicle.

Impulse has been moving deeper into the Pentagon’s launch and space-mobility market. The Space Force last month added the company to the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, allowing Impulse to compete as an upper-stage provider.

8–10 minutes

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — NASA officials say they are confident in plans to launch a nuclear electric propulsion demonstration mission by the end of 2028 after visiting the national lab building the mission’s reactor.

NASA leadership, including Administrator Jared Isaacman and Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, visited the Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, on Aug. 7 to review work being done on nuclear reactors there. That includes designs developed by the lab itself as well as several companies that are using INL to test small nuclear reactors, some with potential space applications.

INL is responsible for the reactor that will be used on Space Reactor 1 Freedom, a mission NASA announced at its Ignition event in March. SR-1 Freedom, slated for launch in late 2028, will use a 20-kilowatt-electric nuclear reactor to power an electric propulsion system originally developed for the lunar Gateway. That will propel the spacecraft to Mars, where it will deploy SkyFall, a set of helicopters modeled on the Ingenuity rotorcraft that accompanied the Perseverance Mars rover.

SR-1 Freedom is intended to be a precursor for future space nuclear power and propulsion systems, Isaacman said in remarks after the tour, drawing comparisons to the USS Nautilus, a U.S. Navy submarine that was the first nuclear-powered vessel.

“This is our Nautilus, and where we go from here must lead to the nuclear NASA of the future,” he said. “What should follow is an agencywide Apollo-like endeavor, a series of SR missions, progressively incorporating new technology.”

That would, in turn, lead to a vehicle capable of crewed Mars missions, he said. “Then we bring those technologies together into a vehicle capable of carrying astronauts to Mars and bring them home safely, and not just once.” That would, he argued, be the culmination of a “third space race” after the original space race of the 1960s and an ongoing second space race to return humans to the moon.

Isaacman told reporters after his remarks that the tour “absolutely” increased his confidence in launching SR-1 Freedom by the end of 2028. “Everybody’s moving very quickly,” he said, including both government and commercial teams.

SR-1 progress and challenges

NASA announced SR-1 Freedom at the same event where it also revealed its intent to establish a lunar base over the next decade. However, while NASA has provided regular updates about work related to the base, the agency has said little about SR-1 since the Ignition event.

At a meeting of two National Academies committees in early June, NASA officials said they were working to streamline management of SR-1 Freedom to ensure it could be ready to launch at the end of 2028, but provided few technical details on the mission and declined to offer a cost estimate. The agency later said it has a preliminary cost estimate of $2.1 billion for the mission.

In an interview after the INL event, Steve Sinacore, NASA’s SR-1 Freedom program director, said the agency had recently finished a “design sync review” for the mission analogous to a mission concept or systems requirements review that examined the status of the major elements of the mission.

Those elements include the Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, a spacecraft originally built for the lunar Gateway with a high-power electric propulsion system. NASA plans to repurpose the PPE as the electric propulsion system for SR-1 Freedom. He said the agency was preparing a contract modification to Intuitive Machines to perform the needed modifications to the PPE.

He added the agency has a concept for the spacecraft structure that will link the PPE with the SkyFall payload and the nuclear reactor. “Procurements are hitting the street for the major components, and so we’re making really good progress,” he said.

The heart of SR-1 Freedom, though, is the reactor itself. The mission will use a design based on the Versatile Autonomous Lightweight Kilowatt-class Reactor Experiment, or VALKRE, a reactor concept developed at INL. That reactor will use high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, also provided by the Department of Energy.

Neither NASA nor DOE have provided many details about the reactor design. Media accompanying the NASA tour of INL were not allowed to take photos or videos in a room that contained information about and hardware related to VALKRE and its application for SR-1 Freedom, and some lab officials were reticent to talk about VALKRE.

NASA officials, though, said they were pleased with what they saw of reactor development at INL. “I was super impressed to see the engineering design unit for VALKRE, the condition that was in, the testing they’ve done,” said Kshatriya.

That heritage is essential to meet SR-1 Freedom’s schedule. “We need to launch by December of 2028, and to do that, we just have to use the things that we have today,” said Justin Coleman, division director for nuclear reactor technology at INL.

That December 2028 launch date requires the reactor itself to be completed by the spring of 2028. “It’s a very aggressive schedule,” he said, but one he felt was achievable based on what companies have demonstrated with small nuclear reactors in the past year. “I think that shows it’s possible, and there is a supply chain that we can pull from to make that happen.”

That supply chain, though, poses perhaps the biggest issue to meeting that schedule. “The biggest challenge is the procurement of components,” said Sebastian Corbisiero, national technical director for the DOE Space Reactor Program, as those nuclear reactor startups also need some of the same components.

“There’s some overlap with some of the components that are needed by these small commercial reactors as well, so the biggest challenge is making sure that we can get all the pieces and parts made in time to meet NASA’s target,” he said.

Coleman, in addition to his work at INL, also serves as a senior adviser to the NASA administrator on space nuclear issues. “In my role at NASA, I’m there to help enable that to happen,” he said of SR-1 Freedom. “So, if NASA’s running into barriers, if they’re running into issues, I’m there to help them remove those.”

Both NASA and INL say they have been cooperating well on SR-1 Freedom. Corbisiero described the collaboration as “badgeless” between the agencies. “You wouldn’t necessarily know whether it’s a NASA engineer or a DOE INL engineer. We are all part of one team.”

“It’s been phenomenal to watch the nuclear reactor design engineers at INL and the NASA spaceflight engineers get together and meld their craft,” said Sinacore. “It gives me great hope that this is going to happen, and it’s going to be sustainable for the future.”

Thinking beyond SR-1

As NASA and INL race to develop a reactor for SR-1 Freedom in time for a late 2028 launch, they say they also want to avoid developing a point design that is suitable for that mission but can’t be extended to later applications, such as a proposed Lunar Reactor 1 that could be used by NASA’s future lunar base.

“All of the technology that we are using will absolutely be extensible to both Lunar Reactor 1 and then the next version of SR-1,” said Sinacore. “That is always in our design decision space: Is it extensible or not?”

Examples of this, he said, are the reactor’s use of a Brayton power conversion system to generate power from the reactor’s heat, which can be scaled up for larger reactors, as well as heat-pipe technology he said could be used on future reactors up to the megawatt level.

“I don’t see any constraints in terms of scaling this up,” said Corbisiero. “Within the reason of the mission cases that we’ve thought about, this technology that we’re pursuing is good.”

Coleman said one goal of the SR-1 Freedom program is to develop a reactor design that can then be handed over to industry to build and revise for future space missions.

“Hopefully, with Space Reactor 1 Freedom, when we are done, we’ll have a design that we’ll say, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough. It works. It meets the objectives,’” he said. “At that point, we have a technology that works, and we hope that there’s a private industry out there that is interested in helping take that technology and then grow it.”

~4 minutes

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Rocket Lab said it has developed a containerized launch system for its Electron and HASTE rockets, an effort to make it easier to operate the vehicles from locations beyond the company’s permanent launch sites and give military customers more options for orbital and hypersonic test missions.

The system, called GHOST, short for Global Hypersonic & Orbital Spaceport Technology, packages the equipment needed to support a launch — including ground-support hardware and range-control systems — into standard shipping containers that can be transported and installed at new sites.

Rocket Lab said the same infrastructure can support both Electron, its small orbital rocket, and HASTE, an Electron-derived suborbital vehicle used to carry hypersonic test articles and other experimental payloads to high speeds and altitudes.

On an Aug. 10 earnings call, Rocket Lab founder and chief executive Peter Beck said GHOST was developed in response to customer demand rather than speculation about a future market. The system stemmed from an actual “request from a customer,” he said, citing strong demand for HASTE and a need “to be able to be a little bit more mobile than we are.”

The first GHOST installation will be at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska on Kodiak Island, where Rocket Lab plans to establish two pads under a new Launch Complex 4. The company said the system is expected to make its operational debut there with a suborbital mission in 2027.

The Alaska expansion is tied to a $266 million Space Force contract for 12 suborbital launches, with options for six more. Most of those missions are expected to launch from Kodiak.

GHOST is designed to reduce the amount of fixed infrastructure Rocket Lab needs to establish when opening a new launch location. That could be useful for military missions that require different flight trajectories or access to ranges outside the company’s existing facilities in New Zealand and Virginia.

For hypersonic testing in particular, operating HASTE from additional ranges could give the Pentagon more flexibility over flight paths and downrange areas rather than concentrating missions at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Rocket Lab also sees potential demand from U.S. allies seeking their own launch capability without building a conventional permanent launch complex. Moving launch sites can open different orbital inclinations and suborbital trajectories depending on geography.

Any deployment would still require an appropriate site as well as licensing, range-safety planning, airspace and maritime coordination and security arrangements.

“Whether it’s for missile defense and deterrence, or opening up more trajectories, orbital missions, and sovereign launch capabilities in allied nations, GHOST is the answer to launching anywhere, anytime,” Beck said.