The second Firefly Alpha rocket in its hangar at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California undergoing final launch preparations.

Industry’s attention is shifting to a larger class of rockets, sometimes called ”mini-launchers” capable of placing about a metric ton into orbit.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...