This Week in Space: VELO +43.7%, Golden Dome $3.2B, New Glenn Flight 2

20 contracts awarded to 12 companies for boost-phase space-based interceptors, with 2028 initial capability deadline. The largest single-week space defense commitment in years.

Blue Origin successfully caught the New Glenn booster on its second flight but fell short of reaching target orbit. A mixed milestone that reveals where the vehicle is on the maturity curve.

CEO Chris Kemp publicly pivots Astra's small rocket narrative toward interceptor target practice, signaling how defense-adjacent startups are chasing the Golden Dome dollar.

Space Force receives its largest-ever budget request alongside a cislunar office launch. NASA science programs face significant cuts, setting up a congressional showdown.

Pentagon finalizes a $1 billion investment in L3Harris missile tracking infrastructure, part of the broader Golden Dome architecture build-out.

Chase Vander

💰 Capital Lens · Managing Partner

"Golden Dome just became the most important VC thesis in space, and the $3.2B starting gun went off this week."

The Space Force's $3.2B award to 12 companies for boost-phase interceptor prototypes is the single biggest signal of the week — 20 contracts, 2028 initial capability deadline, a forced march not a study. VELO ripping +43.7% and the semis cohort (MCHP +12.8%, STM +11.8%, IFNNY +8.8%) tells you exactly where public money is front-running: rad-hard silicon, propulsion, and anyone who can build orbital kill vehicles at quantity. If you're underwriting a defense-space deal at sub-$100M pre right now and the company isn't on the Golden Dome bill of materials, you're underwriting the wrong thing.

Gwen Hawke

⚙️ System Architect · Principal Engineer

"Blue Origin caught the booster and missed the orbit — which tells you exactly where New Glenn actually is on the maturity curve."

The April 20 New Glenn flight is the week's most honest data point. Blue Origin successfully recovered the booster — genuine progress on reusability — but fell short of target orbit. That gap between catching hardware and achieving mission success is where the real engineering work lives. The vehicle is real, the pad ops are maturing, but orbital reliability at commercial cadence is still ahead of them. For anyone benchmarking New Glenn against Falcon 9's current reliability record: they're not close yet, and that's fine — Falcon 9 took years to get there too.

Neil Ashford

🔭 The Long View · Astrophysicist

"The 2027 budget is a Rorschach test: Space Force gets $71B and a cislunar office, NASA science gets the chopping block."

The Pentagon's $1.45 trillion request landed this week with $71 billion for Space Force alongside a new cislunar operations office. Meanwhile NASA science programs face significant cuts. The divergence tells a story: the government is extremely bullish on military space and geopolitical positioning, while basic science — the kind that produced GPS, weather satellites, and materials breakthroughs — is being treated as discretionary. Congress will fight this, but the direction of travel is clear. Science funding in space is increasingly a function of dual-use justification.