Welcome to Edition 1.19 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news this week about the development of rocket engines in the United States, South Korea, and elsewhere. There are also milestones for the Ariane 5 rocket and an anniversary for SpaceX.

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 hits 10 years since the Falcon 1. In an in-depth feature, Ars recounts the harrowing eight weeks following the failed third flight of the Falcon 1 rocket and the finally successful fourth flight. “If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist,” Elon Musk recalled. “That was a very tough launch emotionally.” Shortly after the Falcon 1 launch, SpaceX intensified work on developing its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Humanity could have an outpost on Mars just a decade from now, Elon Musk said.

Musk’s company SpaceX is building a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship duo called the BFR to help our species explore and settle Earth’s moon, Mars and other worlds throughout the solar system.

The billionaire entrepreneur’s long-term vision involves the establishment of a million-person city on the Red Planet in the next 50 to 100 years. But we could get the founding infrastructure of such a settlement — an outpost Musk calls Mars Base Alpha — up and running much sooner than that, he said. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond].

Elon Musk has provided several new, rare, and telling glimpses into how his rocket company, SpaceX, is building a spacecraft to reach Mars.

On September 17, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon on the company’s Big Falcon Rocket or BFR. During that event, Musk showed off new renderings of the launch system, along with a few photos of the work going on inside SpaceX’s spaceship-building tent at the Port of Los Angeles.

These were the first new details about SpaceX’s rocket construction we’d gotten since April, when Musk posted a photo that revealed SpaceX was building the spacecraft using a 40-foot-long, 30-foot-wide cylindrical tool.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has tweeted two photos that give us a peek into the company’s Martian dreams. One of the images shows the BFR, the massive rocket SpaceX is developing for deep space missions, while the other shows the BFR and what he called “Mars Base Alpha.” It’s no secret that the private space corporation wants to build a human settlement on the red planet. Back in 2017, it announced its plans to launch two BFR cargo missions to Mars by 2022 to prepare for the arrival of the first Martian settlers by 2024. Before any of that can happen, though, SpaceX has to be able to start testing its BFR system in the first half of 2019.

The SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, is designed to land back on Earth in way Elon Musk calls “counterintuitive”.

With everyone from NASA to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos looking to send people to the Moon and beyond, engineers at NASA’s Swamp Works are hard at work figuring out how to help future.