August 10, 2025

Boeing Defense Workers Walk Off the Job (Source: AVWeb)
Around 3,200 unionized workers in Boeing’s defense division walked off the job Monday after rejecting a restructured four-year labor agreement with the aerospace giant. Announced over the weekend by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the strike follows the second contract rejection in the last seven days from IAM District 837 union members at Boeing’s facilities in Missouri.

Boeing said that it had offered a deal that would have seen employees’ earnings raised by 40 percent that included a 20 percent general wage increase and a $5,000 ratification bonus. This agreement would have reportedly brought the average IAM District 837 worker’s pay up to $102,000 from $75,000. (8/4)

It’s Time to Unlock Inland Orbital Launch for a Resilient U.S. Space Future (Source: Space News)
As space operations grow in the United States, we face a bottleneck: the limited capacity of coastal spaceports. While Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg remain effective for the nation, these launch sites are becoming congested, and their federally funded infrastructure has struggled to keep pace. Nearby communities face noise, sonic booms, environmental effects and concerns over airspace and ocean access. And although over 90% of launches at these sites are reported as commercial, it is the federal government that supports their operation. (8/1)

Special Aerospace Services Rebrands as Aurex (Source: Aurex)
Special Aerospace Services announced its official rebranding as Aurex. The rebrand marks a signification evolution into a unified, mission-driven provider of advanced systems, solutions, products and technologies across space, missile defense, and hypersonics. Aurex employs over 250 professionals across its network of strategic locations in Colorado, California and Huntsville, Alabama. (8/4)

Starlink Nabs Federal Broadband Funds, But Fiber Is Still the Big Winner (Source: PC Mag)
Back in June, the Trump administration overhauled a $42.5 billion federal fund for high-speed internet, opening the door for satellite providers, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, to potentially receive a larger slice of the pie. Now the changes are starting to play out in Virginia, where Starlink and Amazon’s rival Project Kuiper have been bidding for the funding.

This week, Virginia announced the winners of $613 million from the US’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD). But in a surprise, the state awarded most of its funding, at around 80%, to fiber internet installations, rather than satellite internet providers. (8/8)

Ortberg Solidifies His Role As Boeing’s Turnaround-In-Chief (Source: Aviation Week)
Kelly Ortberg has had the kind of first year on the job that would make many people glad not to be in his position. Weeks after he became CEO of Boeing on Aug. 8, 2024, the company’s central corps of factory workers in Seattle launched a heated 53-day strike. The disasters piled up: prominent management changes, a round of company-wide layoffs, President Donald Trump’s tariffs, federal contract upheaval, the first 787 widebody crash and, above all, Boeing’s worsening finances. (8/5)

Meteorite That Ripped Through Georgia Home is 20 Million Years Older Than Earth (Source: CBS)
A meteorite that ripped through the roof of a home in Georgia earlier this summer is older than Earth itself, according to a scientist who examined fragments of the space rock. University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris examined 23 grams of meteorite fragments and concluded the meteorite formed 4.56 billion years ago. That is roughly 20 million years older than the Earth. (8/9)

Rocket Lab on “Green Light” Schedule to Make First Neutron Launch in 2025 (Source: Space News)
Rocket Lab continues to push for a first launch of its Neutron rocket before the end of the year, but company executives acknowledge that schedule has no margin for error. (8/8)

Golden Dome Teamup: SNC, AV Announce Agreement (Source: Breaking Defense)
Sierra Nevada Corporation and AeroVironment today announced plans to team up on a joint pitch for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome project, aiming at the lower tier of small drones and cruise missiles. (8/7)

Solid Rocket Motor Producers Tout Expansions Amid Growing Need (Source: Aviation Week)
Traditional and new entrants to solid rocket motor (SRM) production are touting new increases to production capacity and other developments as the need for SRMs will continue to expand. L3Harris unveiled a new expanded facility near Huntsville. Northrop Grumman is opening multiple new facilities at sites in Maryland, Utah and West Virginia with the goal of increasing production to 25,000 per year from the current 13,000.

Anduril, a new entrant to the market following its acquisition of Adronos in 2023, is calling itself the third supplier of SRMs in the U.S. The company formally opened a full-rate production facility in McHenry, Mississippi, where it expects to produce 6,000 tactical motors by the end of 2026. The company also has test fired two motors for the Standard Missile program. (8/6)

Rocket Lab Eyes Big Defense Opportunities with New Acquisition (Source: Tech Crunch)
Rocket Lab is signaling to investors, yet again, that it’s more than “just” a rocket company. Rocket Lab’s second-quarter revenues continue to be driven by its space systems business rather than launch. The results also highlighted the company’s acquisition strategy and how its purchase of a new optical payloads company will make it more competitive for lucrative government contracts.

The company’s space systems brought in $97.9 million of the $144.5 million in total revenues for the second quarter. Rocket Labs’ total revenue, its highest quarterly revenue in the company’s history, jumped 36% from a year ago. The company’s net loss widened to $66.4 million. The company is near closing its deal to buy Geost, a company that builds optical payloads, used in missile warning, tracking, and space domain awareness. (8/7)

Embraer Investing $90M to Expand Space Coast Executive-Jet Factory (Source: Florida Today)
Embraer officials are planning a roughly $90 million expansion at Melbourne Orlando International Airport to boost the Brazilian aviation giant's business-jet production capacity, company officials revealed this week during a second-quarter earnings call. (8/7)

China’s Rocket Shortage Means it May Have to Pick a Favored Candidate (Source: SCMP)
China appears to be fast-tracking its Guo Wang a state-run constellation of 13,000-satellites, slated for completion within a decade, tightening control over launch resources and leaving other projects in limbo. Guo Wang has launched three batches of satellites in the past week alone – a sharp jump from its earlier pace of about one batch every two months.

Meanwhile, Qianfan, a 15,000-satellite constellation backed by the Shanghai municipal government, has not launched since March, despite already placing 90 satellites in orbit. With state-owned rockets seemingly out of reach, Qianfan is now turning to private rocket companies for help. The company behind Qianfan issued its second launch tender of the year, seeking seven rocket launches to deploy 94 satellites. The contract, worth 1.4 billion yuan ($186 million), requires all satellites to be delivered into orbit by March next year. (8/6)

SAIC Helps US Army, and Huntsville, Stay on Top of Missile Defense (Source: AL.com)
One of Huntsville’s largest employers – SAIC – is helping the U.S. Army with the latest technology to keep its missile defense and air defense systems running efficiently. The company employs more than 2,000 people in north Alabama and does a variety of tasks in the space and defense industry, ranging from software and hardware development, studies and analysis, to intelligence work. (8/8)

Robotic Spaceplane Flies to Edge of Space to Spy on the Spysats (Source: New Atlas)
Who watches the watchmen and who spies on the spy satellites? It turns out it's an optical package called Morning Sparrow made by Scout Space and carried by Dawn Aerospace's Aurora spaceplane to the edge of space to snap low-orbit spysats.

On July 17, the unpiloted Aurora spaceplane took off from a conventional runway in New Zealand propelled by a bi-propellant rocket engine. The 15.7-ft aircraft with a 13-ft wingspan reached a top speed of Mach 1.03 as it rose to an altitude of 67,000 ft. There, at the edge of space, the Morning Sparrow sensor suite was activated. This Space Domain Awareness (SDA) payload is designed to track and take images of Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) objects that are in low orbits or even suborbital trajectories. (8/7)

Getting a NASA Grant Just Became Overtly Political (Source: NASA Watch)
A new White House Executive Order called “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking“ dropped today. Highlights: “Discretionary awards must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” ... “Applicants should commit to complying with administration policies, procedures, and guidance respecting Gold Standard Science.” ... “Each agency head shall promptly designate a senior appointee who shall be responsible for creating a process to ... ensure that they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”

“Discretionary awards shall not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate: racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation; denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic; illegal immigration; or any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.” (8/7)

Heaviest Black Hole Ever Found Pushes Limit of What’s Cosmologically Possible (Source: Gizmodo)
Researchers announced the discovery of a black hole inside a supermassive galaxy 5 billion light-years from Earth, dubbed the Cosmic Horseshoe. The newly spotted monster is roughly 10,000 times heavier than the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s core. Theoretical predictions set the upper bound of a black hole’s mass at 40 to 50 billion times that of the Sun; this cosmic behemoth stands at 36 billion times the Sun’s mass, so it comes precariously close to what calculations allow. (8/8)