The Overview · your week in space

From The Decisional Pass

A rookie astronaut reached orbit in three hours, the world's biggest rocket refused to light, and NASA quietly bought four more trips to the Moon. Here's the week that was — and a genuinely loaded week ahead.

🧑‍🚀 A first flight for Anil Menon

On Tuesday, NASA astronaut Anil Menon launched to the International Space Station aboard Soyuz MS-29 with cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina — and reached the station just three hours later, catching it in only two orbits. It's Menon's first spaceflight; before NASA selected him in 2021 he was SpaceX's very first flight surgeon, which is a lovely arc. Over an eight-month stay he'll study how semiconductor crystals grow in microgravity and test AR- and AI-guided ultrasound meant to let crews image themselves without a doctor on the loop from Earth. Notably, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was at Baikonur to watch — the first visit by a U.S. space chief in eight years.

References: Space.com · NASA · collectSPACE

🚀 Starship stops itself at T-zero

SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 didn't fly on Wednesday. The countdown reached T-0 and the vehicle cleanly aborted itself when four of the Super Heavy booster's Raptor engines failed to light — and the booster can only tolerate losing three. That's the system working exactly as designed: an automatic hold beats a bad launch. SpaceX plans to swap two Raptors and try again as early as this coming week. This flight is set to deploy the first batch of the larger Starlink V3 satellites.

References: Spaceflight Now · NASASpaceflight

🛰️ The Space Force's mesh keeps growing

Also Wednesday, a Falcon 9 lofted another plane of the Space Development Agency's Tranche 1 Transport Layer — the third batch of operational satellites for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, the constellation meant to relay Link 16 tactical data and low-latency comms across a laser-linked mesh in low Earth orbit. The hard part remains the optical crosslinks that let the satellites actually talk to each other; every batch gets that network closer to switching on.

References: Space.com — Transporter/SDA coverage

🌕 NASA buys four more Moon landings

NASA committed nearly $600 million for four commercial landings targeted for late 2028, under its CLPS program and the broader Moon Base push: Astrobotic takes two deliveries ($297.9M), with one each for Firefly Aerospace ($144.2M) and Intuitive Machines ($148.3M). Every lander carries the same trio of instruments — a laser retroreflector for precision navigation, a radiation spectrometer, and SCALPSS, a four-camera rig that images how a lander's exhaust plume blasts the surface. That last one matters a lot: nobody fully understands the dust a descent kicks up, and you can't build a permanent base until you do.

References: ScienceDaily · NASASpaceflight

👀 On deck — a huge week

• India's first private orbit. Skyroot's Vikram-1 is attempting the first orbital launch by a privately built Indian rocket this weekend.
• A mechanic to GEO. On Tuesday, Northrop Grumman's MRV-1 launches to geostationary orbit to grab aging satellites and bolt fresh propulsion onto them — the one I can't stop thinking about.
• Starship, take two, as early as around July 20.

Space stocks — 7-day movers

Delayed market data via Yahoo Finance — for information only, not investment advice.

Track it all live — who's in orbit right now, the lunar race, and every agency and company on the map — at Orbital Roster.

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