Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.

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.

Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.

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Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that its Neutron launch vehicle won't fly until 2027, citing an issue discovered during manufacturing of the rocket's carbon composite structures.

The announcement was public confirmation of what nearly everyone inside Rocket Lab and the wider space industry already knew. The most recent official update from Rocket Lab in August suggested the company still held hope of delivering the first Neutron rocket to its launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, before the end of this year, a schedule that would have almost certainly pushed the first flight into 2027.

But Rocket Lab's statement Wednesday about Neutron's schedule suggests the company is still struggling with manufacturing the rocket's large booster stage. Neutron's reusable first stage is made of carbon composite structures, which offer low weight, high strength, and corrosion resistance. But carbon composites in aerospace are generally harder to manufacture than metallic structures.

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Welcome to Edition 9.13 of the Rocket Report!

This week, SpaceX celebrated the first orbital launch of its new Starship rocket. I'm not sure many people, at least those outside of SpaceX, expected it to take 14 flights of Starship before it technically reached low-Earth orbit, but Monday morning's launch finally added that to SpaceX's list of accomplishments with its new super-heavy rocket. Starship had gone 99 percent of the way to orbit before, only held back by safety concerns around the possibility of stranding the huge rocket in space.

What was most notable for SpaceX with this Starship flight was that it unlocked a massive growth potential for Starlink, with the first 26 of the network's new-generation Starlink V3 satellites successfully deployed Monday.

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