Enlarge / Nine kerosene-fueled Rutherford engines power Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle off the pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, early Thursday. (credit: Brady Kenniston/Rocket Lab )

Welcome to Edition 6.36 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX wants to launch the next Starship test flight as soon as early May, the company's president and chief operating officer said this week. The third Starship test flight last week went well enough that the Federal Aviation Administration—yes, the FAA, the target of many SpaceX fans' frustrations—anticipates a simpler investigation and launch licensing process than SpaceX went through before its previous Starship flights. However, it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for Starship to start launching real satellites.

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.

Starship could threaten small launch providers. Officials from several companies operating or developing small satellite launch vehicles are worried that SpaceX's giant Starship rocket could have a big impact on their marketability, Space News reports . Starship's ability to haul more than 100 metric tons of payload mass into low-Earth orbit will be attractive not just for customers with heavy satellites but also for those with smaller spacecraft. Aggregating numerous smallsats on Starship will mean lower prices than dedicated small satellite launch companies can offer and could encourage customers to build larger satellites with cheaper parts, further eroding business opportunities for small launch providers.

Enlarge / Within minutes of Thursday's scrub, technicians were on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled rocket. (credit: NASA TV)

On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station.

However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket's engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were unconfirmed reports of an issue with the ground systems supporting the Soyuz rocket.

The three people inside the Soyuz spacecraft, on top of the rocket, were NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. This Soyuz MS-25 mission had been planned for a liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, at 13:21 UTC (6:21 pm local time in Baikonur).

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Frank Rubio smiles and waves moments after arriving back on Earth to wrap up more than a year in orbit. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls )

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian crewmates parachuted to a landing on the remote steppe of Kazakhstan Wednesday, capping a 371-day mission at the International Space Station, the longest single spaceflight ever undertaken by an American.

It was also the third-longest mission off the planet in the history of human spaceflight, eclipsed only by two Russian cosmonauts who lived on the Mir space station in the 1990s.

Rubio, a US Army lieutenant colonel who grew up in El Salvador and Miami, was supposed to spend about six months in low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station. He launched September 21 of last year on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitri Petelin.

Vladimir Putin, center, and Dmitry Rogozin, far right, tour Russia's new Vostochny Cosmodrome in October 2015. (credit: Kremlin)

On Saturday, the Russian space program lost the Luna 25 spacecraft , a relatively small vehicle that was due to land on the Moon this week. After a problem with the spacecraft's propulsion system, instead of entering a low orbit around the Moon, it crashed into the lunar surface.

The Russian mission to the Moon was one of several spacecraft that were to attempt a landing on the Moon in the next six months, alongside probes from Japan, India, and the United States. In this sense, Russia is just one of many nations participating in a second space race back to the Moon, alongside nations and private companies alike.

But unlike NASA, China, India, and several companies in the United States and Japan, the Luna 25 effort does not presage the coming of a golden era of exploration for Russia. Rather, it is more properly seen as the last gasp of a dying empire, an attempt by the modern state of Russia, and President Vladimir Putin, to revive old glories.

Enlarge / Fire from the engines of a Russian Soyuz rocket as it lifted off with the Luna 25 spacecraft heading for the Moon. (credit: Roscosmos )

Russia's space agency successfully launched a robotic spacecraft Thursday on a journey to the Moon, the country's first lunar explorer since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in Russia's Far East, at 7:10 p.m. EDT (23:10 UTC). Heading east, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket propelled Luna 25 through an overcast cloud deck and into the stratosphere, then shed its four first stage boosters about two minutes into the flight. A core stage engine fired a few minutes longer, and the Soyuz rocket jettisoned its payload shroud.

A third stage engine fired next, then gave way to a Fregat upper stage to place Luna 25 into an orbit around Earth. The Fregat engine fired a second time to send the nearly 4,000-pound (1.8-metric ton) lunar probe on a roughly five-day trip toward the Moon. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, declared the launch a success less than 90 minutes after liftoff, shortly after the Luna 25 spacecraft separated from the Fregat upper stage.

Enlarge / Satellite controllers in Dubai monitor the launch of a Soyuz rocket from Russia on Tuesday. (credit: Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre )

For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine essentially cut off Russia’s space industry from foreign customers, a Russian rocket lifted off Tuesday and carried satellites into orbit with commercial technology from Western companies.

The payloads from companies based in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg flew on a satellite owned by the United Arab Emirates, which has maintained warmer relations with Russia than Western countries. Although the payloads are small, their presence on Tuesday’s launch is notable after the war in Ukraine, and resulting Western sanctions , effectively led to an embargo against putting US and European space technology on Russian rockets.

UK and European Union sanctions introduced after Russia’s 2022 invasion prevent exporting a wide range of space technology to Russia. Companies from the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations have moved their satellites off of Russian rockets, primarily switching them to launch vehicles from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and India.

Enlarge / The European robotic arm is seen investigating Soyuz MS-22 after a leak occurred in mid-December. (credit: NASA TV)

Russia's main space corporation, Roscosmos, provided updates on Tuesday about its two spacecraft that recently suffered failures to their cooling systems while attached to the International Space Station.

Although there were several items of note in these updates—which are not readily available to Western audiences due to Russian Internet restrictions—perhaps the most surprising claim is that both the Soyuz MS-22 and Progress MS-21 spacecraft were damaged near their heat radiators by "external impacts." This seems highly improbable, to say the least.

For those who haven't been paying attention to the Russian roulette in space in recent months, here's a summary of what has happened since mid-December:

Enlarge / A Progress spacecraft is seen departing the space station earlier this month. (credit: NASA)

Russia's state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos, reported Saturday that a Progress supply ship attached to the International Space Station has lost pressure in its external cooling system.

In its statement , Roscosmos said there was no threat to the seven crew members on board the orbiting laboratory. NASA, too, said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the space station was open. Notably, the incident with the supply ship came within hours of the safe docking of another Progress ship, MS-22, which is in good health.

Although the initial Roscosmos statement was vague about the depressurization event, Dmitry Strugovets, a former head of space agency Roscosmos' press service, later clarified it was a coolant leak. "All of the coolant has leaked out," he said via Telegram .

Enlarge / A Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS. (credit: NASA )

Today, NASA held a press briefing to describe the situation on the International Space Station (ISS) in the wake of a major coolant leak from a Soyuz spacecraft that is docked at the station. At the moment, neither NASA nor Roscosmos has a clear picture of its options for using the damaged spacecraft. If it is unusable in its current state, then it will take until February to get a replacement to the ISS.

Soyuz spacecraft are one of two vehicles used to get humans to and from the ISS, and serve as a "lifeboat" in case personnel are required to evacuate the station rapidly. So, while the leak doesn't place the ISS or its crew in danger, it cuts the margin for error and can potentially interfere with future crew rotations.

As Roscosmos indicated earlier this week , the impressive-looking plume of material originated from a millimeter-sized hole in a coolant radiator. Although the coolant system has redundant pumps that could handle failures, the leak resulted in the loss of all the coolant, so there's nothing to pump at this point.