Bloomberg reports that SpaceX “successfully launched 40 satellites for competing communications company OneWeb on Thursday.” It’s the first of three “planned missions the unlikely collaborators are set to perform over the coming months despite their separate efforts to build megaconstellations that will beam broadband Internet coverage to Earth.”
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OneWeb 1 Mission, December 8, 2022
(SpaceX; YouTube)
Bloomberg reported Firefly Aerospace Inc. has “launched its first rocket into orbit, advancing the private space startup’s bid to become a reliable partner for NASA.” Firefly’s Alpha rocket “took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Saturday and successfully put three small payloads into Earth orbit, including one for the US space agency. A previous launch attempt failed in September 2021 when the debut Alpha rocket veered off course and had to be exploded shortly after takeoff.” Saturday’s launch “follows years of engineering work, litigation and financial struggles for Cedar Park, Texas-based Firefly, one of several companies NASA selected to deliver science payloads to the moon as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.”
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The Washington Post reports on the Flight Termination System for NASA’s Space Launch System, a “detonation system designed to destroy the rocket in case it starts to veer wildly off course and threaten people on the ground.” The system, while “a vital and ubiquitous” safety component, is “creating a bit of a headache for NASA as it struggles to launch the SLS rocket for the first time.” Although the Space Force “requires the batteries on the SLS’s termination system to be recharged” regularly, this task can “only be done in the rocket’s assembly building,” further delaying “a launch that last week was waived off twice because of other technical problems, including a massive leak of the liquid hydrogen the rocket uses for fuel.” The Space Force had already extended its battery charging time window, and NASA is in discussions “for a waiver that would allow the time frame to be extended yet again,” although the waive would “have to extend the initial 20-day requirement to over some 40 days, since the earliest NASA could attempt a launch is a two-week period that begins Sept. 19.”
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The New York Times reports that “NASA’s big moon rocket is rolling out to the launching pad for the third time – and it actually is slated to launch to the moon.” The rollout “had been scheduled for Thursday, but NASA announced on Monday that the move had been moved up to Tuesday evening.” This is leading up “to the launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission, an uncrewed test of the giant rocket and the Orion spacecraft where astronauts will one day sit.”
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CNET News reports that NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched from the Rocket Lab launch facility in New Zealand on Tuesday, “paving the way for Artemis astronauts to return to the moon in the coming years.” CAPSTONE “will be testing new navigation systems and trying out the halo-shaped orbit around the moon that will one day be occupied by NASA’s Lunar Gateway. The Gateway will be a sort of small space station circling the moon that will be used for staging for Artemis missions to the lunar surface.”
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Official NASA Broadcast of CAPTSTONE launch from New Zealand, June 28, 2022
(NASA via YouTube)
SPACE reported that over the next weeks NASA “will launch three rockets from the Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory on the Dhupuma Plateau, near Nhulunbuy. The rockets are 13 meter ‘sounding’ rockets that will not reach orbit but will take scientific observations.” This is the first time NASA will launch rockets from a commercial site in a foreign territory. The launch will “represent a major step forward for commercial space operators, as well as signaling the opportunity for future joint projects between Australia and the United States.” The rockets “have been designed and built by NASA and will be used for scientific investigations into the physics of the sun, astrophysics and the type of planetary science we can only conduct in the southern hemisphere.”
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NASA launches rocket from Australia’s Northern Territory, June 26, 2022
(9 News Australia via YouTube)
The AP reports that South Korea “successfully launched its first homegrown space rocket on Tuesday, officials said, a triumph that boosted the country’s growing space ambitions but also proved it has key technologies to build a space-based surveillance system and bigger missiles amid animosities with rival North Korea.” The Nuri rocket “succeeded in releasing and placing its functioning ‘performance verification’ satellite at an altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles) after its liftoff from South Korea’s space launch center at 4 p.m.”
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Launch of South Korea’s Nuri rocket, June 21, 2022
(Korea Now via YouTube)
Aviation Week reports that the Russian Aerospace Forces “conducted the first operational launch of a light Angara 1.2 rocket from Plesetsk spaceport in the northern part of the country on April 29. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the launch vehicle successfully orbited the Cosmos-2555 military satellite.”
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Russian Angara 1.2 carrier rocket Moved to LaunchPad