I’m Anthony Colangelo.

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.

A funny note I brought up in the most recent Off-Nominal episode with Eric Berger: this first stage booster specifically has launched 252 satellites to orbit, which is more than any single company except SpaceX has operating in orbit.

After a successful launch last week from Wenchang, Chang’e-5 completed its outbound leg of its trip and has settled into lunar orbit. It’s about to get even more exciting: it appears that they’ll be going for a landing tomorrow, Sunday, November 29 at 20:30 UTC.

I keep going back to this video posted a few days ago by Peter Beck. Stunning footage with unreal audio of stage separation and second stage ignition.

After a fantastic launch and deployment of 30 payloads, Electron’s first stage made it back through the atmosphere and successfully splashed down about 400 kilometers downrange. Peter Beck tweeted an image of the stage as they arrived with the recovery ship. Hell fucking yeah, Rocket Lab.

It’s easy to shrug off the marketing of this as their “first operational fuel depot” because they’re flying with a good bit of funding as a pathfinder mission for their hardware. But for something like a refueling interface that requires adoption by at least a good number of customers for Orbit Fab to find success, marketing is really important.

ESA posted an update after another round of testing the parachutes for the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover, due to launch in 2022, and the results aren’t good: four tears in the first main chute and one in the second main chute.

Pretty embarrassing issue. Inverted hardware is a Russian-class error.

A major bummer, but not much of a surprise, honestly. NSF had dropped funding levels for Arecibo significantly in past years, and it had effectively been saved by a consortium led by the University of Central Florida.

A major bummer, but not much of a surprise, honestly. NSF had dropped funding levels for Arecibo significantly in past years, and it had effectively been saved by a consortium led by the University of Central Florida.

I had not heard of The Launch Company previously, but I probably should have. Their site lists Relativity, Firefly, and Virgin Orbit among their customers.

Chang’e-5 culminates with the samples returned to Earth sometime around December 16–17. I’ll be happily surprised if we get official coverage of the mission, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Very special thanks to the 463 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off for the month of October. MECO is entirely listener- and reader-supported, so your support keeps this blog and podcast going, growing, and improving, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

Big slip for Ariane 6, and 5% growth of development cost—bringing the total development cost to €3.8 billion. Disappointing yet unsurprising news. This news has dredged up another round of Ariane 6 takes that misunderstand the program entirely, though.