I’m Anthony Colangelo.

There’s a lot of interesting flexibility here with Rocket Lab’s new kick stage-derived satellite bus.

A solid $30 million under their previous NASA science mission contracts, but DART is only 500 kilograms, so will likely be sharing its ride.

Very special thanks to the 271 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon for the month of March. MECO is entirely listener- and reader-supported, so your support keeps this blog and podcast going, growing, and improving, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

I was on a call earlier this week with US Air Force officials talking about the Rapid Agile Launch Initiative (RALI), which is the program handling the acquisition of new small launch vehicles.

Good to hear them signing customers, but I’m ready for this era of extreme secrecy of space projects to be over. As far as the launch site is concerned, my bet is on SLC-3W.

Starliner’s uncrewed test is now NET August, and Chris Gebhardt has a pretty brutal piece that’s definitely worth reading on it.

What’s most interesting here is the implication that the US government knew about India’s ASAT testing ahead of time. Additionally, there has been little-to-no response from US officials, aside from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

It’s a big one. I continue to be excited about someone other than Bigelow working on inflatables/expandables.

One of the things I’m always interested to hear more about is Blue Origin’s long-term plans for in-space architecture. Not the general vision of the future—the actual hardware that makes it possible.

From what I’ve heard, Vulcan is making really good progress, and is one of the odds-on favorites for selection for NSSL Phase 2. That said, we’re still waiting for BE-4 to get to full power.

Seems like one of those rounds of funding that was contingent on getting the first satellites up, but good to see the money still flowing into OneWeb. And boy, will they need it.

Fantastic article by Debra Werner, for SpaceNews, that explains the furor over today’s FCC spectrum auction.

The Space Development Agency is up and running, and we have some details on what its first task will be. And this is all a really good example of why I’m supportive of Space Force as a wholly separate branch.

Within the span of 3 days, NASA has officially, publicly stated that they want all previously-SLS-only flights flown on commercial vehicles. This is a massive shift, and as I said yesterday, one that will probably be rejected by Congress.

In the current era, White House budget requests often don’t matter much in the outcome of NASA’s budget, but they do speak volumes about the administration’s intentions.