I’m Anthony Colangelo.

I’m holding off on making too many assessments of the Swarm authorization fiasco until we know a little more than we do now. Did one of the parties knowingly make a nefarious decision to proceed? Or did this really fall through the cracks because of how many parties were involved in getting these satellites up?

We’ll see if anything comes of this, and “last summer” is not an insignificant amount of time in the past, but it’s at least an intriguing project to think about and consider. I’d hate to see Stratolaunch repeat some mistakes from Shuttle with Black Ice, though.

If the air molecules can be collected, compressed, and stored, you could imagine an imaging or communications satellite in orbit around Mars that occasionally drops its periapsis into the atmosphere to refuel, and once refueled, boosts its periapsis back to its operational altitude. Aerial ISRU!

Forgot to post this until now, but last week after the GOES-S launch, I asked ULA CEO Tory Bruno when we’d see the new Orbital ATK GEM 63 solid boosters on Atlas V. He responded: “About a year or so.”

While I admit that companies like Moon Express do need regulatory clarity before spending too much time and money on a project in a regulatory gray area, there are not many projects held up purely because of regulatory uncertainty.

One question I’d like to see answered, that as far as I know has never been asked or commented on: how much time is needed between EM-1 and EM-2 for everything else except the Mobile Launcher?

This mission gives me such agita. Always.

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First and foremost, layoffs are always a major bummer. As far as Planetary Resources goes, I did start to get worried about their future after their pivot to Earth observation in 2016 and then their pivot back to asteroid mining just a few months later. It was—and remains—a confused strategy that was pretty blatantly about chasing the money wherever the money could be found.

I’m still generally skeptical about Vector after the past year or two of mostly empty calories of the PR variety. But there’s another thing about this announcement: it further shows the relative uselessness of Wallops.

Shouldn’t this have been a part of what Bigelow has been doing all these years? It’s way more important to the future of Bigelow than whether or not expandable modules work in space. They could always pivot and build their modules with proven technology, but the business case has to exist either way.