The Space Roundup - Aug 15th, 2021
Hello, my dear space lovers!
This has been a week full of amazing news in the space sector, so let's get started with the updates of the week! 5,4,3,2,1…liftoff!
Bad news
This has been definitely a sad week for some important actors in the industry. The first one is the Indian space agency ISRO. Last Thursday, the GSLV-F10 rocket carrying the EOS-03 satellite didn’t accomplish its mission: the cryogenic upper stage ignition did not happen due to a technical anomaly. This was the first ISRO launch in 30 months (due to COVID and more), so it is especially sad that it didn’t go as expected. Go, ISRO!
Boeing keeps investigating the issue with the Starliner thruster and it seems it’s going to delay the mission for up to several months. Very sad.
And finally, the engineers at NASA keep scratching their heads to understand why the Perseverance rover wasn’t able to catch a martian sample last week, leaving the sample tube completely empty. They now think that “the core was actually pulverized in the drilling process, then scattered around the borehole” but they keep researching this mystery.
SpaceX
SpaceX this week acquired Swarm, a company specialized in constellations of small satellites, mostly because of their intellectual property and expertise in building, launching, and managing constellations of sats. Interesting move.
Also this week, we’ve known that they are preparing to launch Falcon Heavy for the first time in more than two years: it was about time to see this beauty flying! :)
And what about Starship? Elon Musk tweeted that tomorrow “Booster & Ship will return to the orbital launchpad (winds allowing). Just finishing off some small plumbing & wiring, which is easier in the high bay.” , so we will have more updates very soon. Yay!
More exciting updates!
Russia’s Roscosmos has been assembling their next Soyuz-2.1b/OneWeb rocket at Baikonur, while they have been in conversations with Tunisia to train and launch a female cosmonaut into space.
And finally, the Chinese startup InterSpace Explore has announced it’s going to develop a “spacecraft capable of supplying China’s space station”. This is very interesting as the space station is helping create an ecosystem of commercial startups to support it.
Picture of the week
This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features AFGL 5180, a beautiful stellar nursery located in the constellation of Gemini (the Twins). More.
Upcoming launches & events
Let’s see what we have in the week ahead!
Mon Aug 16th - Vega | Pléiades Neo 4
Mon Aug 16th - Long March 2C/YZ-1S | Internet Connectivity Test Satellite
Fri Aug 20th - Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat | OneWeb #9
And that’s it for this week! :)
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut
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