Space Industry Update: Swift Satellite Rescue Attempt Underway
Welcome to Edition 9.01 of the Rocket Report! In January, I wrote about the 20 launches and landings we were most excited about in 2026. Halfway through the year, we can only count one of those events as completed, the NASA Artemis II mission in April. Many others are now scheduled for next year.
The Swift Boost Mission, a commercial mission to reboost the orbit of NASA’s Swift astronomy satellite, launched early Friday after several attempts were hampered by bad weather and technical issues.
This was the last scheduled flight of the air-launched Pegasus rocket, which had been widely used in the 1990s and 2000s for small satellite launches.
Once in orbit, Katalyst’s Link satellite will spend several weeks approaching the Swift observatory, which cannot counteract atmospheric drag and is expected to reenter the atmosphere and burn up later this year.
Launched in 2004, Swift was never designed to be serviced in orbit. The Link mission aims to raise the satellite’s altitude and extend its mission.
