I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Let’s put it on display next to its only rightful partner, the A-3 Test Stand at Stennis. Both are $350 million monuments to dead-end plans.

In what seemed to be surprising news to almost everyone I’ve seen mention it (including me), new solar arrays will be headed up to the ISS starting this year. They will sit on top of the existing arrays so as to take advantage of existing capabilities like sun tracking and power distribution.

I was not optimistic about the speed we’d see here, so I’m pleasantly surprised that the SDA has confirmed their original decision to award SpaceX and L3Harris with contracts to build 4 satellites each for the Tracking Layer Tranche 0.

These satellites are no doubt powerful and quite capable, but they’re astonishingly expensive and made in small production runs, which is why the Space Development Agency and other organizations are interested in seeing what can be done with a constellation of sensors.

I had been expecting this news since the request for proposal went up, so nothing shocking here. Now it’s up to the SDA to sort out the protests surrounding these satellites, which is a bigger and more difficult task.

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I’ve long been a fan of Nanoracks, and this is huge news for them. They have a particular kind of grit that I love to see in a company, and that pairs really well with a long-term-focused crew like Voyager. Let’s see how they can put the new investment to work.

I took a ride out to AGI a year ago and got to see what was going on inside Comspoc. I like what they have going on there, and spinning off to their own entity will clean up the communications around what they offer and why it matters. I’m excited about this.

Chang’e-5 follows in the footsteps of Chang’e-2 and Chang’e-5 T1, which all went on to have interesting and sometimes unexpected extended missions. It feels a little like finishing a mission in Kerbal Space Program and realizing you brought along way too much fuel.

A great rundown on LC-48 by Anthony Iemole for NASASpaceflight.com. I expect to see Astra and ABL flying from this location in the not-too-distant future.

These kinds of acquisitions seem to me to come with two truths: they’re always way less about space than we like to think, and they always change less than we like to imagine.

All in all this seems like the right call. At a certain point, the risk of bigger delays coming from the process of fixing this issue is more than the risk on this particular flight. We have yet to see political support of Orion and SLS be eroded in any meaningful way, but every increasing delay has to catch up at some point.

I mentioned some of this in a recent podcast episode, but considering how long it will take to get BE-4 production up to the point of supporting multiple Vulcan flights alongside the first New Glenn flights, and considering that we have heard little to nothing on the BE-3U front in quite a while, it sure seems like we’re still at least 2 years out from New Glenn’s first flight.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Chinese private space companies these days, but news like this makes the recent revisions to US commercial remote sensing regulations make so much sense.

Glad that everyone made it to the ground safely, but this is rough timing for Virgin Galactic. All the pomp around them having relocated VSS Unity to Spaceport America, talking up the fact that they’ll be starting commercial flights next year, and then this kind of thing comes up.

These three launch providers will be of great interest to NASA if and when they get flying regularly. NASA would like to not only help provide payloads and incentive to get them flying, but to also have a foot in the door early to start understanding their work, their capabilities, and maybe a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes at these companies. Relatedly, I’m slightly concerned about what they’ll find at Firefly, because something seems to be up there.