I’m Anthony Colangelo.

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.

Though ISRO doesn’t have an official human spaceflight program just yet, they’re making good progress on fundamental components, including the abort systems and the launch vehicle—GSLV Mk. III. Looks like this was a successful test of the abort system, save for the crew module separating from the parachutes on final descent.

Very special thanks to the 206 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon for the month of June. Your support keeps this blog and podcast going, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

It certainly reads to me like they really want to see some details about what New Glenn could offer, and they want to know if Blue Origin would put a bid in for the launch.

Dawn is now in its final orbit at Ceres, and it has a shockingly-low periapsis of 35 kilometers. For some perspective, SpaceShipTwo’s most recent flight achieved a peak altitude of 34.9 kilometers.

I’ve heard that they did lose a day due to weather last week, and have been working around some since, but this is at least somewhat encouraging. I’ve also heard a lot of skepticism about the vehicle that is supposed to be attached to this engine, but I guess we’ll see soon.