Space Roundup Feb, 28th 2021
Hello, my dear space lovers!
This has been a crazy week: so many updates in the Space arena!
I recommend grabbing a cup of coffee or a beer, getting comfortable, and enjoy reading this monster of an update! :D 5,4,3,2,1…liftoff!
Mars!
The highlight of this week, can’t be other than the Mars landing video and the high-resolution panorama picture that the Perseverance rover sent back to Earth. I am pretty sure you have already seen it, but if that’s not the case, go see the picture and move around zooming in or out… It's truly amazing the level of detail and the resolution of the image. It’s hard to believe it’s traveled 400M Kms to get to us!
Commercial Space
In the commercial side of the industry, SpaceX performed a hot fire test with the Starship SN10 prototype and swapped a faulty engine in record time. The flight test is now imminent: will we see it fly this same week? #wenhop? I even designed a shirt with this same question, haha! :D
As part of SpaceX’s #Inspiration4 program, SpaceX announced this week the new civilian astronaut they have chosen: a bone cancer survivor, a 29-year-old physician assistant named Hayley Arceneaux… this is the kind of astronauts I like to inspire the rest of us!
Very soon we will know about the rest of the crew that will fly as part of this program. And then, this week we’ll have an update about the #DearMoon project, a private mission that will take 8 to 11 people to travel to the moon onboard a SpaceX Starship for 6 days. So exciting!
Successful launches
This week we’ve seen Russian, Indian and Chinese launches...go, humanity, go! :)
Delays! :(
We have also received several bad news in the form of delays this week.
Virgin Galactic further delays SpaceShipTwo test flights for more than two months, pushing space tourism back to 2022, exactly as Blue Origin, which will delay the first launch of the New Glenn rocket to late 2022.
But not only private companies delay their launches and tests, as NASA also postponed the second SLS Green Run test while maintaining they see a “reasonable chance” of a first SLS launch this year...who knows?
Innovation
The startup Orbex announced it now has a giant 3D printer that can start printing rocket engines at a pace of 35+ per year… that’s an engine every ten days! Not bad.
NASA has disclosed a series of innovative ideas they have funded this year and one of the coolest ones is the lunar levitation track system for fast transport on the lunar surface.
Another very interesting idea is a lightweight and deployable structure design that could serve as the backbone of a large rotating spacecraft capable of producing artificial gravity. According to the team it could be launched inside a single Falcon Heavy and then be deployed autonomously to a final size of a kilometer or more on-orbit without assembly. Find more about these innovative ideas here.
Stoke, a startup founded by former Blue Origin and SpaceX employees has raised $9M to support their effort to make a fully 100% reusable launch vehicle. And this same week Relativity Space unveiled plans for a new, much larger and also fully reusable orbital rocket: the Terran R vehicle. It seems many are in the race for reusable rockets. Who will be the first one to achieve it? We’ll see!
And what’s up with China?
A lot of activity this week! After working through the 27th lunar day, the Yutu 2 lunar rover traversed 652.62 m on the Moon's far side this week. It is now the longest-working lunar rover on the moon, with all payloads still working perfectly fine.
On Feb 24th, China successfully launched a new group of Yaogan remote sensing satellites to survey the electromagnetic environment.
That same day, Tianwen 1 entered its Mars parking orbit and will now stay in there without much maneuvering during the next three months before releasing the landing capsule.
This week, the rocket that will transport the Chinese space station has been brought to the launch site in preparations for the launch and it will now be assembled and tested.
Talking about new rockets, the Chinese Space Agency announced this week that it plans to conduct the maiden flight of the Long March 6A carrier rocket before the end of this year.
But there are more new players!
Yes! This week South Korea announced its plans to spend $553 million on space projects in 2021, most of which will go to develop the first South Korean rocket: the KSLV-2.
Astronomy discoveries
Astronomers have found evidence for white dwarfs (dead stars that once were like our sun) consuming entire Earth-like worlds, and in this same week, another group of scientists made progress on a theory that states that water is a building block on planet creation, and not an accidental element that arrives through comets collisions as it was thought before. If that’s the case, then water worlds may be really abundant in our galaxy. Read more about this discovery here.
Pic of the week
No, no, no! These are not stars, but 25,000 supermassive black holes! (Source: LOFAR/LOL Survey)
Scientists have been working for years to create this map of black holes. Combining data from 52 antenna stations spread across nine European countries, over a combined 256 hours of observation time, each white dot in this map is a supermassive black hole in its own galaxy. How crazy is that? It is like a “negative” view of the space, and it just covers 4% of the northern half of the sky.
Upcoming launches & events
Sadly, not many launches this week!
March 1 - Falcon 9 • Starlink V1.0-L17
March 1 - Starship SN10 10km Flight? (Tentative date)
And that’s it for this week! :)
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut