Rocket Report: Beyond Gravity to study fairing reuse; North Korea launches satellite

Enlarge / Thirty-three engines fired to power the Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket into the sky. (credit: Stephen Clark / Ars Technica)

Welcome to Edition 6.20 of the Rocket Report! We apologize for missing last week, but both Stephen and I were in transit to South Texas for the Starship launch. To make up for it this week’s report is extra long, and a day early due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. But that doesn’t mean the spaceflight action stops, with an eagerly awaited hot fire test of the Ariane 6 rocket expected Thursday. See below for details on how to watch live.

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.

North Korea launches spy satellite. North Korea’s launch of a small, solid-fueled Chŏllima-1 rocket, which has a capacity of about 300 kg to low-Earth orbit, appears to have been successful, Reuters reports. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the US Space Force data had cataloged two new objects in an orbital plane consistent with the launch from North Korea at the time stated by Pyongyang.