The Orlando Sentinel reports that “delayed two days because of weather, a NASA satellite that will look at the tiniest parts of the air and ocean blasted off early Thursday morning and shook households in Central Florida when the rocket’s booster unleashed a massive sonic boom during its landing.”
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SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches NASA’s PACE-Payload
(NASASpaceflight; YouTube)
Space News reports, “Starlab Space, a joint venture of Voyager Space and Airbus Space and Defence, announced Jan. 31 it reached an agreement with SpaceX to launch the Starlab station on Starship. The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement or a projected launch date, although a spokesperson for Starlab Space said the company was confident that Starlab would be launched before the decommissioning of the International Space Station, currently scheduled for 2030.” Voyager Space Chairman and CEO Dylan Taylor said in a statement, “SpaceX’s history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab. … SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship.”
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Starlab Space Station Update
(The Space Race; YouTube)
The Orlando Sentinel reports that SpaceX has once again lent a hand providing launch services for one of its competitors as a Falcon 9 rocket took up a Northrop Grumman spacecraft on a…
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Official NASA Broadcast
(NASA; YouTube)
Aviation Week reports that Beta Technologies “has concluded the first deployment of its Alia electric aircraft to a US military base, completing three months of flight testing with the US Air Force at Duke Field on Eglin AFB, Florida.”
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Space News reported that Virgin Galactic “conducted its first suborbital mission of 2024 on Jan. 26 as the company prepares end flights of its current spaceplane.” The VSS Unity spaceplane, “attached the VMS Eve mothership aircraft, took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at 12 p.m. Eastern.” Unity “separated about 45 minutes later, igniting its hybrid rocket engine.” The flight “carried four customers for the first time, along with its two pilots.
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#Galactic06 Recap
(Virgin Galactic; YouTube)
The Washington Post reports that the four-pound drone completed 72 flights before damaging its rotors during a landing last week.
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Space News reports that Blue Origin “has secured a contract with the U.S. Space Force for integration studies related to its New Glenn launch vehicle.” The new agreement “marks a significant step in Blue Origin’s potential participation in the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 program, a multi-billion dollar procurement of launch services for national security satellites.” The Space Force “awarded Blue Origin nearly $18 million for ‘National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 early integration studies to assess launch vehicle trajectory and mission design, coupled launch loads, and integrated thermal environments to inform compatibility between launch vehicles and space vehicles for missions planned in fiscal years 2025 and 2026.’”
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Bloomberg reports that as private space firms “like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin step up rocket production and development and more nations race to the moon, mid-size manufacturers that provide their equipment and supplies are reaping the benefits.” Companies including “satellite builder MDA Ltd, heat-transfer manufacturer Graham Corp, and aluminum maker Constellium SE all saw share gains of two-thirds or more in 2023, driven in part by the billions of dollars in private and government funding for space exploration and the creation of large-scale satellite networks.”
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SPACE reports that Ingenuity has officially “regained communication with ground control.” According to a January 20 NASA post, Perseverance “had conducted long-duration listening sessions to help pinpoint Ingenuity’s signal.” Everything “seemed fine during the probe’s 72nd hop on Mars’ red surface, as it successfully climbed to an expected maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and communicated its ascension status with Perseverance.” But, during descent, NASA said that “communications between the helicopter and rover terminated early, prior to touchdown.”
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Aviation Week reported, “From hydrogen to nuclear fusion, Aviation Week’s Graham Warwick and Guy Norris report on the bleeding-edge aerospace technologies that were discussed at the recent AIAA SciTech forum.”
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