I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Eric Berger joined Jake and I to talk about his recent trip to Kourou, the European launch sector, Commercial Crew announcements, and the social eating segment of JAXA launch streams.

“On 17 July 2018, an ancient lump from space thwacked into the Moon with enough energy to produce a brilliant flash of light. With another space rock seemingly in pursuit, a second flash lit up a different region of the Moon almost exactly 24 hours later.”

This Vulcan double-submission theory is something I’ve speculated about on the podcast and elsewhere in the past few months. The fact that we aren’t hearing the engine selection until the award announcement has me nearly completely convinced that’s the case.

Very special thanks to the 217 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon for the month of July. Your support keeps this blog and podcast going, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

Speaking of early shutdowns, Astra launched just about two weeks ago, but the results are unclear—the FAA stated there was a mishap, and Alaska Aerospace told SpaceNews that “the customer is very pleased with the outcome of the launch.”

There’s still some murkiness here. Was the 1.5-second firing the full duration that they were aiming for with this test, or did it shut down early? I’ve heard the latter.

The cooling system is provided by none other than—you guessed it—Northrop Grumman!

A couple of takeaways from Blue Origin’s ninth New Shepard mission.

How high is this sucker gonna go?

As someone who can spend all day in any given aerospace museum, this is quite a treat. Big thanks to Ian Dawson for linking to this.

“The unanimous vote by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and the agency’s three commissioners lays the groundwork for the transition of some, or possibly all of the 500 megahertz of spectrum commonly known as C-band.”

Blue seems to be trying really hard to limit the downsides of dual manifesting, and a single price for a ride to orbit no matter how you fly or when is a huge departure from the norm. It really only makes sense two ways: the entry price for a ride on New Glenn is shockingly low, or Blue will have no shortage of their own payloads to fly. Or both.

“The Cygnus spacecraft’s BT-4 main engine, supplied by IHI Aerospace of Japan, fired for 50 seconds Tuesday. The engine produces around 100 pounds of thrust, and the maneuver raised the orbit of the roughly 450-ton space station by 295 feet (90 meters).”

The entire Russian space industry is crumbling, from engine sales to launches, so they’d be thrilled to continue selling us the unused Soyuz seat for the next few years for $80+ million (instead of a fraction of that for a tourist).

Teslarati posted some great photos of the recent upgrades to Mr. Steven’s net. This thing looks absolutely batshit crazy.

The total firing duration was about two Shuttle flights to orbit, so total duration isn’t the surprising thing here—it’s the fact that they could turn the engine around quick enough to pull this off. We’ll see where this goes from here, but I don’t have high hopes.

Shannon Stirone joined Jake and I for a deep dive into the history, present, and future of the Deep Space Network—including some crazy stories about the DSN getting hacked.