Welcome to Edition 9.18 of the Rocket Report! Blue Origin packed a lot of news into one afternoon Thursday with the reveal of a new kick stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design, and the minor and widely expected delay for New Glenn's return-to-flight mission from December until January. The reconstruction of Blue Origin's wrecked launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues apace after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There's a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon, and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.

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.

SpaceX vets work on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially harvestable resource on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, Ars reports. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. Argo Space's satellites will use water not only as a propellant, but also as a coolant and radiation shield.

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© NASA/Keegan Barber

The New York Post used a Hokusai work to depict Donald Trump being swept away by Democrats’ midterm election win. Some in Japan were bothered by the imagery.

© Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press

In books and essays, he captured the unease beneath Japan’s economic miracle and wrote about everyday people who might never appear in headlines.

© The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

The rise of Korean terms in Japanese is a striking reversal from colonial times and a sign of the global appeal of South Korean culture.

© Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

“Vivant,” a Japanese thriller that features Chinese spies, has drawn intense criticism from Beijing. Its creators defend the show, saying it is “completely fictional.”

© Andy Wong/Associated Press

The disclosure heightened concerns about A.I.’s potential to upend cybersecurity unless shortcomings are addressed.

© Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language.

© Geert Vanden Wijngaert/Associated Press

Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language.

© Geert Vanden Wijngaert/Associated Press

Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth, a daring international project that could yield new insights into the formation of the Solar System.

The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3 rocket, Japan's flagship launch vehicle. The rocket assigned to MMX debuted a new souped-up configuration with four strap-on solid rocket boosters, full-throttle main engines, and an extended payload shroud to accommodate the demands of Japan's heaviest and most ambitious interplanetary mission to date.

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© ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck

Manufacturers say they are close to perfecting a new, more efficient solar panel that could help the United States reclaim ground it lost.