Welcome to Edition 5.11 of the Rocket Report! Apologies for the lack of a report last week, but I was on assignment with the crew of the forthcoming Polaris Dawn mission. The upside is that this week's edition is extra-long—running to 2,500 words.

SpaceX congratulated a researcher who said he hacked into Starlink using a $25 homemade device as part of the company's bug bounty program.

NASA on Tuesday awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with a contract to provide launch services for the next space telescope mission. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is 2.4 meters in diameter, is slated to launch in October 2026, the space agency said in a press release. Under the contract, SpaceX will launch the telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Not long ago, SpaceX passed their Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) with the FAA, though many corrective actions were recommended. With this hurdle in its rearview mirror, SpaceX is busy preparing the Starship and Super Heavy prototypes for their orbital test flight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk congratulated the SpaceX team for conducting three "flawless launches" in under one week. "Congrats to SpaceX Falcon team for executing 3 flawless launches in 2 days!, Musk tweeted on Sunday.

As SpaceX gears up for another launch of Starlink satellites, astronomers are concerned the company maybe backsliding in its efforts to reduce the brightness of those satellites. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off at 12:08 p.m. Eastern June 17 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, placing 53 Starlink satellites into orbit. This mission will bring the total number of Starlink satellites launched to more than 2,700, with more than 2,450 in orbit.

June 17 (Reuters) - Private rocket company SpaceX fired at least five employees after it found they had drafted and circulated a letter criticizing founder Elon Musk and urging executives to make the firm's culture more inclusive, two people familiar with the matter said. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

NASA Artemis team members and agency representatives visited the Starship factory in South Texas to discuss the company’s progress. "SpaceX hosted NASA leadership at their Starbase facility in Boca Chica, TX, for an update on Starship, the human landing system that will carry the next American astronauts to the Moon...

NASA plans to buy five more SpaceX crewed flights to the International Space Station. The agency announced a "sole source modification" to its contract with SpaceX, which operates the only American system currently carrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The expected value of the modified contract was not disclosed in an agency blog post(opens in new tab) Wednesday (June 1).

The company's president and COO defended Elon Musk in an employee email obtained by CNBC following Insider's report on the sexual misconduct claim.

SpaceX's president and chief operating officer predicts that humans will reach Mars before the end of the 2020s. Gwynne Shotwell said in an interview with CNBC: "We should put people on the surface of Mars within a decade." She then added: "I think it will be in this decade, yes."

A crewed Mars mission could happen sooner than you think. Astronauts will likely make it to the Red Planet's surface before the end of the 2020s, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC's Shepard Smith recently.

Four astronauts successfully returned home to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft today, bringing an end to their six-month-long stay on the International Space Station (ISS). After undocking from the ISS early Thursday morning, the crew dove through Earth’s atmosphere before splashing down underneath parachutes off the coast of Florida at 12:43AM ET.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has again delayed whether to issue SpaceX environmental approval of its suborbital launch and expansion plans in South Texas. The FAA said SpaceX has made “multiple changes” to its environmental assessment application. This is the fifth time the FAA has delayed its decision, with the final iteration of the agency’s environmental assessment initially due in December 2021.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both want to colonise space. Nasa is also trying to put people on to the dusty surface of Mars. But if humans do want to set up communities on the moon or planets, what will they eat? Plenty of experiments have been conducted to see whether plants can flourish in space.

The U.S. military needs to take a page out of SpaceX's book in combating electromagnetic warfare, as Elon Musks's aerospace company has notched "eye-watering" wins against Russian hackers in Ukraine, Pentagon officials said this week. The first shipment of SpaceX's Starlink terminals, which connect to satellites in low-earth orbits, arrived in Ukraine just days after Russian forces invade the country and started disrupting internet service.

There's a small rocket company based in eastern California named Pythom Space. And like a lot of space startups, it has big dreams. In this case, co-founders Tina and Tom Sjögren have the goal of flying to Mars in 2024—and if not then, by 2026.

If you would go back to 2014 and say NASA would be pro-flying reflown boosters in the future, I think many people would find you crazy. However, after the booster that flew Axiom-1 to space landed for its fifth time, NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted his preference for these reused boosters.

Like it or not, the threat of conflict is rising. This makes it necessary for key global players to build and maintain state-of-the-art intelligence infrastructure that can operate independently.

A SpaceX rocket ship has blasted off carrying the first all-private astronaut team ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS), a flight hailed by industry executives and Nasa as a milestone in the commercialisation of spaceflight. The team of four selected by Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc for its debut spaceflight and orbital science mission lifted off on Friday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida.