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.
Very special thanks to the 470 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off for the month of November. 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.
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.
SpaceX Crew-1 successfully launched and docked last week, kicking off a new era of the ISS. It’s a good time to zoom out and look at the ISS program overall, and what it means for the future of space development.
Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger of Ars Technica to talk about the space policy fallout of the 2020 US election, Eric’s upcoming book, and Jake’s bad decisions.
Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger of Ars Technica to talk about the space policy fallout of the 2020 US election, Eric’s upcoming book, and Jake’s bad decisions.
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.
