H3 – Spaceflight Now

January 12, 2026

Breaking News

[ January 10, 2026 ] SpaceX deploys NASA’s Pandora, other smallsats amid 1st ‘Twilight’ rideshare mission Falcon 9
[ January 9, 2026 ] L3Harris announces $845 million majority sale of Space Propulsion and Power Systems business News
[ January 9, 2026 ] Crew-11 to cut mission short and return to Earth due to medical issue Mission Reports
[ January 8, 2026 ] FCC gives SpaceX “green light” to expand Starlink constellation to 15,000 satellites Falcon 9
[ January 7, 2026 ] NASA weighs an earlier end to the Crew-11 mission after a ‘medical situation’ with an ISS crew member postpones first spacewalk of 2026 Mission Reports

H3 rocket suffers upper stage anomaly, fails to correctly deploy navigation satellite

December 22, 2025 Will Robinson-Smith

The Dec. 22 launch was the fourth and final flight of an H3 rocket in 2025.

Japanese space science missions facing delays after H3 rocket failure

April 11, 2023 Stephen Clark

The launch of a Japanese X-ray telescope and robotic lunar lander has been delayed to no earlier than August, and the launch schedule for another Japanese mission to return samples from a moon of Mars is in doubt as engineers investigate the failure of Japan’s first H3 rocket last month.

Phobos sample return mission enters development for 2024 launch

February 20, 2020 Stephen Clark

Japan’s space agency has approved a robotic mission to retrieve a sample from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth to begin full development for a planned launch in 2024, officials said Thursday.