Space News reported that during an AIAA online event Tuesday, Jennifer Warren, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of civil and regulatory affairs, “said space sustainability is a common objective of many countries ‘but I really think achieving and maintaining it requires a level of international collaboration and cooperation that we’re still aspiring to.’” Warren said that in order to get to a safe operating environment for spacecraft, “I would suggest…not uniquely inter governmental or uniquely private sector discussions, but…a very robust multi-stakeholder approach.” Warren “said Lockheed Martin has advocated for satellite operators to adopt the World Economic Forum’s Space Sustainability Rating (SSR),” which is an in-development rating system that scores “manufacturers and operators based on factors such as plans to de-orbit systems upon completion of missions; choice of orbital altitude; ability of systems to be detected and identified from the ground; collision-avoidance measures; size and number of objects left in space from the launch vehicle; and sharing of data.”
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Tag: July 2021
Blue Origin Confirms Vehicles for Tuesday’s Crewed Mission Are Ready for Launch
Forbes reports that on Sunday, Blue Origin “announced that everything looks set and ready to go for its first human spaceflight, which will launch” company founder Jeff Bezos “and three others over 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface before their safe return.” The mission is scheduled to launch Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. EDT. Chief engineer Chris Jaeger said, “The vehicles are ready to fly.” He added that the New Shepard rocket and the RSS First Step capsule have been checked since their last test flights, and “there are no engineering or technical issues” with the vehicles.
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