And here’s the megafeed of everything I’ve been doing.
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.
For a variety of reasons, I have not been closely following most of the European small launchers in development. But Isar says they’re funded through first launch with this round, and they have an agreement to launch from Kourou rather than an as-of-yet nonexistent launch site in Europe, so they’ve got my attention.
Yesterday’s flight of Starship SN8 has to be one of the most interesting, exciting, and downright spectacular flight tests of my lifetime. In a dim year, it certainly brightens your day to watch, even if it does not bring you optimism for the future. And there are some truly meaningful takeaways from the flight.
This is great news for cash-hungry SpaceX as they roll out Starlink. It’ll help subsidize the antenna cost that SpaceX is reportedly losing quite a bit of money on per unit.
The Space Development Agency may have the goal of speeding up acquisitions and development of space systems, but until they solve the protest-laden nature of the beast, they can only make so much progress.
This is such a no-brainer of a program for NASA, assuming they can get the money and approval for it from Congress. It would solve a massive need for NASA—a dwindling and soon-to-be-if-not-already-overloaded communications network at Mars—while also pushing the private industry to up its game and prove itself. If the program comes to fruition, I would mark this down as close to a must-win for SpaceX.
I joined Brendan Byrne on his show Are We There Yet? for a few minutes to talk about everything going on in the small launch space these days. My chunk of the show follows an interview that Brendan did with Jay Skylus, founder of Aevum, who showed off their Ravn X mockup last week. Have a listen, and if you aren’t subscribed to Brendan’s show, then use this opportunity to fix that.
A smooth first launch and docking for the cargo version of Dragon 2. Most excitingly, the Nanoracks Airlock, Bishop, is stored in Dragon’s trunk and will be installed on Node 3 later this month.
A new company plans to launch small satellites from the belly of a drone. It joins the growing number of small launch companies popping up to send tiny payloads into space. So what’s the market for these small satellites?
We’ll dive into this growing industry first with Jay Skylus — he’s the CEO and founder of Aevum. His company has plans to launch small payloads on a rocket launched from the belly of an unmanned aerial vehicle. What does he see heading to space on his vehicle? And what will it take to get the Ravn X UAV off the ground?
Then, Aevum joins the growing market of small launch providers. We’ll take a look at the state of the industry with Anthony Colangelo — he hosts the commercial space-focused podcast Main Engine Cut Off about this bustling market and the future of the small satellite industry.
A lot of big, long-running projects have faced delays recently, and it seems like as good a time as any to check in and share some related thoughts. I cover a lot in this one: the Orion PDU issue, Ariane 6, Japan’s H3, Dream Chaser, Vulcan, and New Glenn.
The failure is a loss of redundancy and not a total system failure, so they could decide to fly as is, but that is extremely not NASA, especially on such a high-profile mission like Artemis 1. The info Loren got is that there are a few ways to go about fixing the issue, but they all mean a months-long delay—between 4 and 9 months estimated—before Orion would be ready to meet SLS for flight.
Because this program is more about setting precedent than actually generating useful science, technology, or infrastructure, in some ways I feel like this announcement alone is good enough, especially with 10% of the contracted price changing hands today.
Big news out of India. ISRO has signed the first agreement with a private company for access to facilities and expertise to help with development of their small launch vehicle, Agnibaan.
Sadly, the evaluation was correct: Arecibo was dangerously unstable, and it collapsed on Tuesday. Thanks to Carlos Perez and Adrian Bague, there is incredible footage of the moment.
Depressing state of affairs over in Russia. Make sure you read this article by Eric Berger for the list of which officials have been fired, arrested, or both.
Everything is super delayed. And I mean everything: H3, Ariane 6, Vega C, Orion, SLS, Dream Chaser, Vulcan, New Glenn.
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Dr. Marco Langbroek has been tracking USA 310, the satellite deployed on the NROL-101 launch, and it turns out it went to an 11,000 kilometer orbit at 58° inclination.