Officials held a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the oceanside Launch Complex 3 on Thursday. While pausing to mark the milestone, however, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said there’s still a lot of work to be done—and that the company is racing to meet its goal of launching Neutron on its first flight by the end of the year.
“This is not to squash anyone’s dreams. This is to say you can’t just go up there and use lead pipes to make bathtub gin.”
The organizations’ plan is to educate members of Congress on the importance of NASA science, and the wide-ranging benefits the agency provides to the whole country.
NASA’s budget cuts may force the space agency to miss the chance to study the asteroid Apophis when it makes a close fly-by of Earth—but academia isn’t giving up on the opportunity.
Small sats have historically mainly made their homes in LEO, but more and more operators are shrinking the size of the platforms they send to GEO and beyond.
HummingSat’s first commercial mission will be a satellite to provide additional capacity for Intelsat (now SES).
“We have a dynamic going on with the Space Force in space right now in that we’re scared to use our satellites,” Stevens said at a panel on the sidelines of SmallSat hosted by Redwire.
“I haven’t even spoken to Acting Administrator Sean Duffy,” she said. “I don’t know when a new [permanent] administrator will potentially be confirmed. There are a lot of unknowns, so absolutely we are so nervous.”
The partnership with Digantara, an Indian space surveillance startup, aims to get customers in contact with their sat within three hours of launch.
The two companies have a mutual supply agreement that will allow them to share tech and make mutual introductions among customers, according to TRL CEO and founder Nicol Verheem.
Many good ideas are hatched over a beer. One is heading to space this afternoon.
“There needs to be more transparency on how the world is thinking about lunar sustainability,” said Charity Weeden, a former NASA policy chief whose views do not represent the agency. “It’s critical not to mess up, because you don’t necessarily get a second chance.”
