Firefly Aerospace’s Dec. 22 flight went as expected until the second stage of its Alpha rocket malfunctioned.

Among Western launch vehicles alone there were five partial or complete failures on orbital launches in 2023 (six when counting the second, suborbital test flight of SpaceX’s Starship in November.)

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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...