October 2025 - Fall Space Industry Update
Your backstage pass to the future of space, now featuring successful failures, diplomatic explosions, and the realization that testing things doesn't always prevent them from exploding anyway
Welcome back, cosmic enthusiasts, orbital optimists, and everyone who spent the summer watching methodical drop tests and is now wondering why fall decided to remind us that rockets are fundamentally controlled explosions that sometimes get less controlled than intended. You're reading The Rogue Orbiter, and late summer through October 2025 has been a season of paradoxes—historic achievements immediately followed by spectacular setbacks, proving once again that space remains persistently difficult.
While summer was all about careful preparation and drop tests, fall has been about discovering that even when you test everything twice, physics occasionally decides to add a pop quiz. It's been a humbling few months that perfectly illustrate why space companies keep engineers employed and insurance premiums high.
SpaceX Starship: When You Nail the Landing But Lose the Ship
August 24, 2025, marked SpaceX's 10th Starship test flight, and it perfectly encapsulated the cognitive dissonance of modern spaceflight: achieving something historically unprecedented while simultaneously demonstrating how much remains to be figured out.
Flight 10 successfully met all mission objectives after a challenging series of four consecutive failures, which in SpaceX-speak translates to "we finally got one to work the way it's supposed to, and we're as relieved as you are."
The Super Heavy booster performed flawlessly, executing the kind of precision landing that makes parallel parking look like advanced calculus. After separating from the upper stage, the massive first stage completed a controlled descent, demonstrating the hover capabilities that will eventually—assuming nothing explodes—enable landing this beast back at the launch tower for rapid reuse.
The engineering reality: Between January and August 2025, Starship's Version 2 upper stages had a catastrophic failure rate that would make insurance underwriters weep. Flight 7 in January featured a booster catch success immediately followed by the upper stage suffering a propellant leak that caused fires—the aerospace equivalent of successfully parking your car before discovering the engine is on fire. The issue stemmed from oxygen and fuel leaking into a cavity above the engine firewall, building pressure faster than the vents could handle, because apparently teaching a spacecraft not to leak explosive chemicals into places they shouldn't be remains harder than it sounds.
What makes these iterative explosions particularly significant is that Starship is supposed to become NASA's lunar lander for the Artemis III mission. When your moon taxi keeps exploding during test flights, it tends to make people nervous about timelines. NASA is now aiming for mid-2027 for Artemis III—assuming Starship can string together enough successful flights to convince everyone that putting astronauts aboard won't result in the most expensive pyrotechnics show in human history.
October 13 brought Starship's 11th test flight, continuing the pattern of incremental progress mixed with controlled chaos. The Super Heavy booster again executed precise maneuvers, while the upper stage deployed simulated Starlink satellites and demonstrated engine relight capabilities in space—proving that at least some parts of this absurdly large rocket are beginning to behave predictably.
The Artemis Program: Political Theater Meets Rocket Science
In early September 2025, the Senate held hearings focusing on the space race with China, which brought renewed attention to whether the United States will actually get humans back to the moon before China puts taikonauts there. The debate isn't whether to go—everyone agrees we should—but how to get there and with what hardware.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy made headlines by suggesting NASA might reopen the contract for the Artemis III lunar lander, specifically mentioning Blue Origin as a potential alternative to SpaceX's troubled Starship. The justification was diplomatic but pointed: SpaceX is behind schedule, and the United States is allegedly in a race against China to return humans to the moon.
Elon Musk's response was equally diplomatic—if your definition of "diplomatic" includes firing back on social media that Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the moon. Which, to be fair, is technically accurate, though it's worth noting that SpaceX's payload-to-the-moon record currently stands at "a banana plushie that stayed inside the vehicle."
The sustainability angle: Artemis II is scheduled for no earlier than February 5, 2026, and will be the first time humans travel beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo program, testing Orion's life support, propulsion, and navigation systems with a crew on board. The mission faces challenges beyond just the lunar lander debate—Orion's environmental control systems need validation, and engineers are still investigating heat shield behavior from the Artemis I reentry.
The program illustrates a fundamental tension in space exploration: we want rapid development and innovation, but we also want astronauts to survive the experience. These are occasionally conflicting goals, especially when political pressure meets orbital mechanics.
NASA's IMAP Mission: Mapping the Edges of Our Solar Bubble
In September 2025, NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9, marking a genuinely successful mission that didn't involve anything exploding unexpectedly—a refreshing change of pace.
IMAP is headed toward the first Lagrange point (L1), located about one million miles from Earth, where it will have a clear, continuous view of the solar wind streaming outward from the Sun. The spacecraft will collect data on how charged particles move and accelerate through the heliosphere—the vast protective bubble carved out by the Sun's magnetic field and solar wind.
Why this matters for space sustainability: Understanding how high-energy particles behave in space isn't just academic curiosity—it's critical for space weather forecasting and astronaut safety. Solar storms can fry satellite electronics, disrupt communications, and expose astronauts to dangerous radiation levels. IMAP will help refine models that predict these hazardous space weather events, making space travel slightly less likely to result in expensive electronics becoming expensive paperweights.
The mission also demonstrates that while we're busy testing how to land massive rockets and build lunar bases, we're simultaneously working to understand the cosmic environment we're venturing into. It's like installing a sophisticated weather station before building a house—sensible, if less visually dramatic than watching things explode.
Firefly Aerospace: When Testing Prevents Launch Failures By Creating Test Failures
September 29, 2025, brought a reminder that sometimes testing prevents launch failures by discovering problems the hard way. During testing at Firefly Aerospace's facilities in Briggs, Texas, an Alpha booster designated for Flight 7 exploded on the test stand. Firefly reported there were no injuries, but the booster was lost.
For those wondering why this matters, Firefly's Alpha rocket represents the small satellite launch market—a crucial sector for deploying the constellations of communications, Earth observation, and scientific satellites that increasingly define modern space infrastructure. The two-stage Alpha, which stands 96.7 feet tall, debuted in September 2021, and just two of its six orbital launches to date have been fully successful.
The explosion was particularly ill-timed because earlier in September, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had accepted the results of Firefly's anomaly investigation into the April 2025 failure and its mitigation plan. That April failure was caused by "plume-induced flow separation"—aerospace-speak for "hot exhaust gases behaved badly and caused structural heating that our engineers didn't fully anticipate."
The testing philosophy paradox: Firefly's statement emphasized that "regular testing is part of Firefly's philosophy—we test each critical component, engine, and vehicle stage to ensure it operates within our flight requirements before we ship to the launch pad". Which is exactly the right approach, even though it means occasionally losing expensive hardware on test stands instead of during actual launches.
The aerospace industry operates on a principle that sounds counterintuitive: it's better to discover problems during testing than during operational flights. Ground tests cost money and hardware, but they're cheaper than losing customer payloads, damaging launch facilities, or creating space debris. Firefly's September explosion, while spectacular and expensive, prevented a potentially worse failure during an actual launch carrying a Lockheed Martin satellite.
At the time of its initial public offering in August 2025, Firefly raised $868 million at a $6.3 billion valuation, with shares surging 34% on opening day. Following the September explosion, Firefly stock tanked 20%, demonstrating that investors care deeply about whether rockets explode, regardless of whether they explode productively during tests or unproductively during launches.
SpaceX Milestones: When Success Becomes Routine
While everyone was focused on explosions and political drama, SpaceX quietly achieved genuinely impressive milestones. During the week of August 31 to September 6, SpaceX achieved its 500th successful booster landing milestone while also surpassing 2,000 Starlink satellites deployed in 2025.
Let that sink in: SpaceX has now successfully landed 500 rocket boosters—hardware that previous generations would have thrown away after a single use. The company is deploying satellites at a rate that would have seemed science fiction a decade ago, fundamentally changing the economics of space access.
SpaceX conducted four Falcon 9 launches for its Starlink network in a single week, with back-to-back missions from California and Florida, underscoring the company's dominant commercial launch tempo and its push toward a record 170 missions in 2025.
The sustainability paradox: SpaceX's reusability revolution reduces the cost and environmental impact of each launch, making space more accessible. However, the sheer volume of satellites being deployed raises questions about orbital congestion and long-term space sustainability. We're solving the cost problem while potentially creating a traffic problem—trading one challenge for another, though arguably a more manageable one.
Looking Ahead: The Humility of Progress
Late summer and fall 2025 provided valuable lessons about the nature of progress in spaceflight. SpaceX demonstrated that even after extensive testing and multiple failures, you can eventually achieve historic successes—and then immediately face new challenges. NASA showed that political pressure and technical reality don't always align on convenient timelines. Firefly proved that rigorous testing culture sometimes means expensive hardware explodes before launch instead of during it, which is actually the desired outcome even though it looks bad on quarterly earnings calls.
What we're watching: SpaceX's continued Starship development and whether Version 3 can break the curse of upper-stage failures. Artemis program developments and whether political drama translates into actual changes in hardware selection. Firefly's investigation into their September test failure and path back to flight. The steady drumbeat of successful Falcon 9 launches that increasingly feel routine despite being technologically remarkable.
The space industry is learning that maturity doesn't mean eliminating failures—it means failing productively, learning systematically, and gradually expanding the envelope of what's reliably achievable. We've gotten quite good at landing rockets that used to be thrown away. We're getting better at building reusable upper stages, though they still occasionally explode. We're methodically testing lunar landers and mapping the solar wind and deploying satellite constellations at unprecedented rates.
Space remains hard. But we're getting measurably better at it, even when progress looks like an explosion on a test stand or a political argument about which rocket should carry astronauts to the moon.
Got questions about why rockets still explode despite extensive testing, how reusability is changing space economics, or whether we'll actually make it back to the moon before China? Drop us a line. We promise our explanations will be more entertaining than watching congressional hearings about space policy, though possibly less dramatic than watching test stands explode.
Stay curious (and patient with the learning process),
Your Visionary Vanguards at Marhold Space Systems
P.S. The most successful space programs are often the ones that embrace systematic testing, even when it means occasionally losing expensive hardware before it ever reaches the launch pad. Here's to productive failures.
P.P.S. If you're keeping score at home: SpaceX landed its 500th booster, Starship had mixed but improving results, Firefly exploded a test article instead of a flight article (which counts as success in the testing business), and NASA continues debating lunar lander options while China quietly works on their own moon program. Space: where progress and setbacks share the same press release.