Russia Debut New Soyuz Rocket With Most Powerful Rocket Engine - Deep Space Updates May 2nd

Hello, it's Scott Manley here. It's Saturday, May 2nd. In April, we saw SLS and New Glenn fly. In May, we expect to see Starship fly. It is definitely time for another batch of deep space updates. And so, let's talk about the launches.

So, first of all, Starlink launches. We had three from Vandenberg on the 22nd, 26th, and 30th. And we had one from Florida on slick 40 on the uh May 1st. interestingly to me, 20th Sorry, the April 22nd launch was a twilight launch from the west coast. I was out, I could see the second stage cloud very clearly. But if you were in SoCal, there was a lot of amazing photos that came from

that. Anyway, let's look at the rest of the launches. April 22nd, we had Rocket Lab launching their Electron from Mahia in a mission called Kakushin Rising. And this was into sun-synchronous orbit. It is part of Japan's innovative sign satellite technology demonstration program flight number four. Carried basically eight uh small CubeSats for various Japanese universities. For example, there was Origami Sat 2, which featured a large unfolding antenna. Uh it also had like the Waseda Sat 0, where the zero is not the number of the satellite, but it is the number of screws that were used in creating the structure for it because it was all 3D printed metal. April 23rd, Russia launched Angara 1. 2 out of Plesetsk into sun-synchronous orbit carrying Cosmos 2617 through 2620. Four satellites into 322 by 338 km 97° orbits. These are probably military low Earth orbit communications or reconnaissance satellites. Um I mean, based on previous launches into this kind of orbit from this kind of profile, it looks like the payloads are able to maintain orbits. They probably have propulsion, but we don't really know what they're doing because they're secret military things. April 22nd, a Long March 2D launched out of Xichang into low Earth orbit carrying uh you know the Hilluwang Jishuxian four satellites 9A through D. These are communications test satellites in 500 km orbits by 55° inclination. Essentially, experimental satellites testing low Earth orbit communications technology built by I think four different contractors essentially. You know, they're this is part of a test program for a more complex communications constellation. April 26th, uh we had a Long March 6 launching out of Taiyuan uh carrying Pakistan's PRSS-EO3. And this is the third member of Pakistan's remote sensing satellite constellation. This is into a 38° by 550 km orbit. Uh and there was another piece of news regarding Pakistan and China's collaboration. I'll get to that in a minute. Uh April 25th, we had a Soyuz 2. 1A launching from Baikonur. This is carrying Progress MS-34 to the International Space Station carrying essentially cargo and consumables. You know, food, water, oxygen, fuel, and a new Orlan space suit. Uh another older Orlan space suit is currently getting pushed into an old progress to get dumped at some point. We're not going to get a suit sat image this side, unfortunately. In preparation for this Soyuz MS-32 has been deorbited. I believe there might be some images of that out there. April 28th, we saw an Atlas V launching out of SLC-41 Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This was carrying 29 Amazon Elio satellites. This was the biggest baddest Atlas V the 551 variant. It was also known as well it was it was the seventh of nine launches on the Soyuz. So, seven of Nine. Um that is this of course They're currently launching this because Vulcan is still on the ground right now. They are still performing that investigation. April 29th, a Falcon Heavy made its first launch of 2026 from launch complex 39A carrying a ViaSat 3 APAC. As this is a geosynchronous communication satellite, it was delayed a couple of times due to weather issues and I believe this payload was actually originally supposed to fly on an Ariane uh 6 4 like debut launch, but it got switched at some point. But, yeah. This was also the first time we've had the Falcon Heavy boosters landing with the new landing pad. So, the boosters aren't coming down right next to each other anymore. They're coming uh set you know fairly long distance apart. During the launch also, uh apparently BlackSky had a uh reconnaissance satellite in the right place. I say the right place, it wasn't really the right place because they had to go way off nadir to look sort of sideways at this. They caught this cool twilight shot of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy uh before the launch and then they got another shot off it actually taking off, which is really cool to see this spy satellite shot or imaging reconnaissance satellite image of you SpaceX's Falcon Heavy taking off. And then the next day we had an Ariane 6 uh 4, you know, four solid rocket motors carrying satellites for Amazon's Leo constellation, 32 Kuiper Sats. This is the second of 18 launches for Arianespace. And apparently this is the last time they're going to fly with the P120C boosters uh for the Amazon Leo. There's new boosters are coming in the pipeline, the 140s I believe. And this was also the first time they launched an Ariane 6 4 at night. And then on April 30th

this was a special one. This is a debut of a new rocket. It didn't make it to orbit, but that was intentional. This was a Soyuz 5, which is in no way related to the previous Soyuz by any design. The name, well, this has gone through a few different names. I think it was previously called uh Irtysh. Uh it was called Sunkar, which is Kazakh for Falcon. But really what it is a Russian replacement for the Zenit launch vehicle. So, Zenit was, of course, Ukrainian launch vehicle with Russian engines, and it was great. They It was, you know, very capable. Elon Musk even said that it was the best rocket in the world before Falcon came along. But uh obviously, that collaboration stopped, and Russia has been without a launch vehicle that sort of matches that capability. So, they've been building a replacement using like new RD-171MV engines, which are essentially versions of the RD-171 with the non-Russian components replaced. Uh it it's like two stages, kerosene-oxygen, puts 18 tons into low Earth orbit. And it can actually be mated with a third stage, which is either the Block DM or the Fregat, if you want extra performance to say do geostationary payload. Interestingly, it's designed to use the same launch infrastructure in Baikonur that the old Zenit launch vehicle used, but they've also tried to reuse existing tooling. So, the tank size is larger. I believe the tank is based on a Proton launch vehicle, but it's obviously being mated with different engines. But anyway, this was a successful flight by all accounts. It was intentionally suborbital. It had a payload, a new simulator. They launched it off, and it performed essentially a dogleg, so that as they're flying the upper stage, they're able to fire that to depletion while having it remain suborbital. Payload went into the Pacific. So, I expect we will see some other launches from this tin the process, but you know, it's taken a while to get to this status. Now, I know a lot of you like to watch my space news coverage, and I'm always working hard to cover all the stories

because I know that's what you want to hear. And this has actually becoming par for the course for most news sources. They report things in a way that their audience wants to hear, and they avoid stories about things that they think their audiences don't want to hear. Audiences are being sliced and diced by region, demographics, and political leanings. So, it's becoming hard to get a clear view of any news story free from bias, which alters the way the story is presented, or it sometimes leaves critical stories untold. And I believe that this is a problem because most people actually agree on many things. But if you're a news service, you really want clicks, and it's becoming clear that controversy drives more clicks than consensus. Anyway, I personally think that it's pretty important to see the whole world without this kind of filtering, and that's why I'm happy to share this video sponsor, Ground News. It's a news service that aggregates multiple news sources so that you can see how the same story is being reported by different outlets with different biases. Unlike other sources, Ground News isn't trying to sell you their version of the truth, but instead give you a more complete view of how different people see their truths. And looking at yesterday's hearing on NASA's budget, where administrator Jared Isaacman testified before Congress on the proposed budget, it shows a much clearer divide where left-leaning publications stressed that Republicans and Democrats on the committee were in agreement on the White House's proposed budget being insufficient, while right-leaning sources like Epoch Times quoted Isaacman as saying, "NASA's proposed budget is still greater than every other space agency science budget in the world combined. " So, Ground News helps you see the world from more angles, and more importantly, it provides tools to help you understand what the underlying opinions, motivations, and owners of a particular source might have, and might help you in turn understand why they're presenting a story in a certain way. And yes, despite the name, Ground News still covers news in space. So, subscribe to get 40% off Advantage Plan by scanning this QR code or by going to ground. news/manly. Now, back to the video.

Anyway, I was talking about China and Pakistan collaborating. Well, when the Pakistani reconnaissance satellite was launched, they also announced that China has selected two Pakistani astronaut candidates, well, in collaboration with Pakistan, obviously. Muhammad Zeeshan and Ali Kurumdaz, and they will basically travel to China for training. One will be a payload specialist and will become the first foreign astronaut to visit Tiangong. So, that's you know, big news. First you

know, time that Tiangong is supporting or will allow non-Chinese astronauts on board. Uh China also said that they are betting big on the space data center game by the sound of things. So, while there is you know, a private company looking for investment, China Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology, the Chinese government basically said, "Yeah, we're going to guarantee something like 8. 4 billion dollars worth of loans. " So

clearly they are making the cash available if the market works out. Anyway, the big news in terms of NASA for the last few weeks has been Jared Isaacman going around to all the different you know, like Congress, you know, different appropriations committees, and essentially saying talking about NASA's proposed budget, which as you remember, after Artemis was launched and headed towards the moon, the White House Office of Management and Budget said, "No, we should cut NASA's funding. " So, everyone on these committees, the politicians, very much seem to disagree with this, regardless of what side of the house they are coming from. Jared, for him, he seems to be walking a fine line where he's sort of saying, well, more NASA funding would be nice, but I'm not criticizing the White House budget. So, you know, saying, well, we could actually do more with less. Regardless, over the various you'll hearings, it's now clear that both the House and the Senate are planning on reversing a lot of these cuts, and at the very least keeping NASA's budget stable, which will technically be a cut because of inflation, but still most of the massive cuts to science and specifically the cuts to the education office are very likely to be reversed.

But one of the things that came out of this hearing was a comment about you canceling the Lunar Gateway, and Jared said there's only two habitable volumes which were delivered, and both were corroded, and that's unfortunate. And this was this sort of confirmed a bunch of things we'd been hearing, that there have been corrosion issues. So, this is like the European lab module and the habitation module, the Halo module. And it sounds like these are all pressure modules that have been coming from Thales Alenia, who have been building a lot of these things. They've been building them for the Cygnus spacecraft. They are also building the pressurized modules for Axiom Space. And it sounds like everyone is seeing corrosion issues with this hardware, and they're trying to get to the bottom of

this, but this is also affecting Axiom's private station as well. So, this is sort of big news. While Jared, of course, has been doing his tour of all the politicians, the Artemis 2 crew, they are now out of their sort of post-flight research mode, and they're now doing all the public appearances. They've been on like Good Morning America. They were on Jimmy Kimmel. They signed his like Dark Side copy of Dark Side of the Moon. They opened the New York Stock Exchange. So, you know, they've been out and about. There's been some fun stories coming from them, and it's been, you know, great to see them acting like humans again on Earth.

And if you want to see more of the images from it, I'm going to point out that a couple of days ago, Hank Green, another YouTuber who, you know, does, of course, you know, he started the whole Crash Course thing with his brother, John. He just like posted a video where he's like, "Oh, yeah, I made an a website, artemistimeline. com. " Which takes a lot of the images which have been published and it puts them on a coherent timeline along with like the crew activities and the spacecraft position in space using the Horizons, uh, you know, ephemeris. And, you know, this sounds easy, right? Cuz all the images are supposed to come with like EXIF data, that's supposed to have the time. Well, apparently, the cameras were not all synchronized. And so, he had to like go in and look at put images published in mission control where they had timings on the screen and you could see where the Earth was Moon was and the Sun and you could match those to the images and match the cameras together. And that's how he sort of built a coherent timeline by calibrating all the clocks, you know, by working them against each other. Anyway, it's a cool website to visit and it's awesome to see, you know, Hank, basically, he's always been as bit of a space nerd, but now he's a real honest to God space nerd. The kind of person that focuses on the images of mission control to reverse

engineer some esoteric fact that they were trying to, you know, sort out. Uh, elsewhere in post-NASA news, uh, Sunita Williams, she retired from NASA recently. Now, she is joining Vast as an astronaut advisor. Yes, uh, so, you know, was it 600 days in space, 62 hours

of spacewalks? Yeah, so, she is, uh, going to be working with Vast going forwards. On April 22nd, the FAA announced that it is going to start collecting use fees for payloads launched or returned to the US. 25 cents per pound of payload, which isn't a big deal when you're thinking that they're paying thousands of dollars per pound. Uh the launch apparently is going to be capped at a $30,000 per launch. That's still pretty big pieces of hardware. And the fees are essentially required by an FAA reauthorization act that was passed. So, the money is supposed to go to integrating your systems that are required to integrate launch, you know, uh space air space management into the national airspace system so that the

controllers aren't surprised when a rocket breaks up and they have to reroute a bunch of flights. Uh Overview Energy, if you might remember I mentioned them, they had uh broke out of stealth last Christmas. Uh they had basically talked about space-based solar power beaming energy back. You and they had demonstrated technology with this. Well, they have got a deal with Meta. Meta isn't doing the space database thing data center thing. They're going to get their power beamed down from space direct to Earth. And yes, there may be efficiency losses, but it means that you're not having to launch all the computers into space and you can manage them all the ground. Uh so, they are supposed to be selling up to 1 gigawatt of power to Meta in future data centers with the plans for Overview's first satellites doing this will be a demo in 2028 followed by commercial service in 2030. So, uh that's again, not everyone While everyone seems to be seeing the wisdom in powering data centers from solar

panels in space, not everyone believes that the panels the hardware itself needs to be in space. European Space Agency have showed off the full-size test model of their Space Rider hardware. Now, Space Rider is a project which has been worked on by Europe for quite a while. They launched or flew a subscale version sometime back. This is essentially It's not quite a space plane, but it is a space capsule with moving aerodynamic surfaces that allow it to steer and make relatively precise touchdowns using you know, parasails. So, they built a full-size version. It's about the size of a minivan and it will perform like full-scale tests. They're going to drop it and then demonstrate that it can deploy its control surfaces, steer itself correctly to a landing. Um so, that is Europe like moving closer to

having a domestically capability of returning payloads to the surface. Japan's Martian Moons Exploration Spacecraft is now at the Tanegashima Spaceport ahead of its launch on an H3 rocket later this year. This will of course kick off its mission to Mars where it will visit the moon Phobos and Deimos, but very specifically it hopes to land or at least get close enough to the surface to collect samples from Phobos so that they can bring those back to Earth. Uh so, this mission will launch uh yeah, later this year. It'll get I think you know, 2029 or thereabouts. Uh and yeah, the idea is that this will help perhaps look at the origin of

the Martian moons and maybe give us some clues to where they came from, whether they are ejected from the surface of Mars or whether they were somehow captured. In Australia, Gilmour Space has concluded its investigation of the maiden flight of Australia's uh first orbital rocket, the Eris. If you remember, it took off and it pretty much stayed vertical and began backsliding and ended up landing on the ground. And there wasn't huge giant explosion because with Gilmour's rocket, they use hybrid engines and the engines most of the fuel is stored as a solid propellant on the walls of the things and then they inject the oxidizer down. So, what their investigation showed that the 9 seconds after launch or ignition, one of the motors pumping hydrogen peroxide uh ended up experienced a problem, then another one 17 seconds later and with only two engines running, it was thrust to weight less than one, began backsliding and ended up landing. So, they identified the failure modes which were originating from the oxidizer pump system. Electrical and thermal faults were apparently involved. And so, now they have a clear understanding of the underlying causes, they're hopefully going to fix it and re-fly at a future time. One launch that won't be happening again is the Soyuz launching from Kourou in South America. Uh because that launch pad was just blown up by a new pad owner's Maya Space. So, obviously Soyuz

stopped launching back in 2022. That was after a career of like 26 commercial launches from South America. Uh that obviously stopped after Russia tried and failed to invade Ukraine. Maya Space are now taking over the pad. They have like a two-stage methalox semi-reusable rocket which they want to be flying off this pad. And so, they have to be clearing it and that involved taking

explosives to the service tower which was used to service the Soyuz in vertical uh prior to it to launch. Uh cool image that came out was from Vantour who have been of course doing on-orbit imaging. To celebrate the birthday of Hubble Space Telescope, they snapped a photo of it from orbit. And it's kind of amazing to see the Hubble Space Telescope up close. I think it's like what? Like 20 years since anyone last saw it up close in public? Because of course, while Vantour are showing off this amazing capability to the public, we're pretty sure that they've had this capability for a while and US and other, you know, nation states no doubt have on-orbit imaging capabilities which are at least

as good if not better than this. Regardless, it's pretty cool to see this image. Uh in Europe, RFA Rocket Factory Augsburg, they've submitted its application for uh the licensing to uh perform test flight one from the Saxa Vord spaceport in Shetland. And this is like a requirement that they get this paperwork going. The launch window currently opens no earlier than July 1st this year. Again, this is just a legally required step. They clearly think that they're getting to the position where they might need this, and they don't want the paperwork to be the thing that's holding them up. I would really like to see them launch, especially since they're

launching from Scotland. I don't think I'll be able to get to Scotland to see this, but you know, miracles might happen. People paying attention to space junk have noticed that the Falcon 9 upper stage, which launched Blue Ghost and Hakuto R on the way to the moon, uh is going to collide with the moon on August 6th. So, that will be a pretty cool thing to actually see. Now, I don't know if we'll see anything from the Earth. It's going to hit on the limb of like a half moon, so it's very likely that this won't actually generate anything that we can see because it's going to be a very bright side of the moon. It's going to be kind of only visible over North America and South America really for the geometry. But, it's hard to see anything like that against the bright side of the moon. Maybe it throws off a plume that can get seen. But, I hope that we have the satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and maybe Chandrayaan-2 are

able to go and get some photos of this site before and after because it would be very cool to actually see this. Blue Origin, they posted footage of the BE-7 flight engine 3. Uh so, that's basically performing uh hot fire testing. This is going to be required, of course, for their lunar launch launchers. And uh yeah, I mean, basically they show this thing performing a vacuum test inside a vacuum chamber with a an expansion nozzle to you know extract the gas and keep the pressure inside the chamber. That's pretty cool to see that, but they also showed an even more cool video. They showed the camera on the fairing from flight number three of New Glenn. And essentially they had RCS on board this ginormous fairing. They showed it apparently getting you getting some sort of controlled attitude, but then later on we see it sort of flapping around losing attitude control and eventually hitting the surface. But the point of this is they tracked this thing and they recovered this thing because the plan is that they are going to fit these things with parachutes or you know parasails and eventually glide these in somewhere

where they can be recovered and reused because these are I believe the biggest fairings in the world. And finally finally talking about the other company that's fairing recovery Starship. Starship V3 it is happening. It's happening. It is. We have seen from South America Cadena OIS they've published a launch track in their advisories to their air traffic controllers and this is going to be I believe on May 12th at the earliest although they have backup days from the 13th through the 18th within the same launch window. Notably the launch trajectory is now south [snorts] of the original plan trajectory. So it's going to be inclined to about 30 degrees azimuth between like it's going to fit now between Mexico and Cuba. So it's not going north now anymore. It's going way south. This will be a new flight route and I guess it means that they have different places where they could potentially launch drop debris if it happens. So yeah we're getting ready towards this and I know I was like I really want to see the next Starship flight. But now I'm in like hardcore training for my instrument rating test, and I can't really leave. So once again, I'm going to miss a launch. — Timing is everything, let me tell you. Anyway, SpaceX, if you want to watch more about the work that's being done on Starship and Super Heavy, SpaceX have Well, they've blessed us with like a 25-minute documentary on development of Starship V3, you know, going like behind the scenes on the current test campaign, how they were ramping up to test the engines, how they you some of the engine fires we saw were you cut short, and now we have reasons behind it, but we also have like amazing high-quality 4K footage from SpaceX of some of these events that we've only been able to watch remotely. We have the close-up cameras showing the Starship exploding when the COPV fails. We have the video of the booster exploding. And so, yes, it is fabulous. It's always great when SpaceX shares this kind of stuff because I believe that they're a mature company that shows that they are not embarrassed by their failures. They're happy to share these failures because they believe that success is coming or they already have the success, you know. I think that's really important to be a mature company and not be uncomfortable with your failures because your failures are just going to uh communicate like uh the ways that you're going to move on in the future. So yes, if you're not like me, if you're not cramming for an instrument check ride in the next couple of months, maybe you want to get down to Texas, take in that whole Starship launch in person. I don't know when it will

launch, but I'm pretty sure excitement will be guaranteed. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe. — Mhm.