Yesterday, NASA hosted an Advisory Council meeting to recap 2021 and discuss updates to many of its programs, including Artemis and the ISS, with the public. Mission update: Ax-1, the first all-private astronaut trip to the ISS, has apparently slipped a month to March 31. The agency didn’t elaborate on the change. Artemis updates: The much-anticipated lunar […]
Pentagon procurements are on pause until the federal government passes the full-year defense appropriations bill, USSF Chief of Space Operations John W. Raymond and other DoD officials testified Wednesday. Backstory: The government is currently operating on a stopgap spending bill, or continuing resolution (CR), that ends Feb. 28. Congress is considering passing a yearlong CR, stretching […]
Atomos Space announced yesterday that it raised $5M total in 2021, thanks to checks from Cantos Ventures, a deep tech VC, and another unnamed investor. The Denver-based company is developing an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that can find and attach to satellites and tow them to more desirable locations. “We really want to be the […]
Where in the world is Perseverance? The NASA rover is wandering around Mars’s Jezero Crater right now, gathering evidence and samples in titanium tubes for scientists back on Earth to analyze for evidence of microbes. The agency and its partners are developing a mission for late this decade to ferry those samples back to Earth no earlier […]
The global community of astronomers can’t get enough of JWST as the huge, powerful space telescope passes through a series of carefully planned and controlled deployments, consisting—as you’ve probably heard by now—of 344 single-point failures, over 75% of which are now retired. The telescope, to state the obvious, is rather large. The size is a […]
The upper stage from a failed Russian space launch is expected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere at some point today, Ars Technica reports. The stage, Persei, deployed from an Angara A5 rocket and successfully performed an initial burn, but failed to perform a second burn out of four that would have delivered a dummy payload into […]
China’s biggest space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), led a record-breaking year of launches in 2021. And CASC isn’t slowing down—the contractor announced on social media Saturday that it has 40 launches planned for 2022, including six that will finish construction of the Tiangong space station. The last 365 days: CASC’s Long […]
Firefly Aerospace will temporarily stop preparations for an early 2022 Alpha launch, following a CFIUS recommendation that a foreign owner divest his equity stake, Bloomberg reports. That stake, about 50% of Firefly shares, is owned by US venture fund Noosphere Venture Partners, run by Ukrainian-born investor/entrepreneur Max Polyakov. CFIUS = The US Committee on Foreign Investment in the United […]
Icarus’ wings got a makeover. NASA’s Parker solar probe, made out of carbon composite rather than wax, passed the Alfvén critical boundary marking the edge of the Sun’s corona in April, NASA announced this week. The probe is three years into a seven-year mission to collect data on the corona that we can’t understand from […]
Yesterday, Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week wrapped in Paris. The conference gathered together leaders in the burgeoning global satellite industry, many of whom shared project updates and reflections on the state of the industry. Some key highlights: Megaconstellation critiques: Too many companies are filing plans for megaconstellations that probably won’t (or shouldn’t) be built, according to some WSBW […]
CesiumAstro, an Austin-based software communication system developer, has announced plans to accelerate production on the second generation of its active phased array product, Nightingale. The software-defined steerable array can attach to satellites to provide inter-satellite and ground connectivity and is optimized for lunar and cislunar applications. The acceleration was prompted by a Phase II NASA SBIR grant […]
Things are picking up in space tourism. Over the weekend, a record-breaking 19 people were in space at once during Blue Origin’s six-passenger tourist flight. And it’s only going up from there. Over the last week, two flights carrying eight total private space tourists launched: Blue Origin’s NS-19 mission carrying Michael Strahan et al to […]
