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!
SpaceX’s Starship (and picture of the week)
What else can we start with? This week we’ve witnessed the most amazing engineering feat of the decade(?) The stacking of the full Starship, after the installation of 29 Raptor engines in a single night, made the whole space community applaud SpaceX’s agility and boldness.
120 meters of awesomeness, the biggest, highest, most powerful rocket ever built by humans. Ah! And if wans’t enough, the first fully reusable orbital rocket.
What’s next? After the stacking test, Elon tweeted that for the next two weeks the plan is to do the following:
I can’t wait to see this beautiful monster fly!
Martian updates
While the Ingenuity helicopter has flown once again to a new location 380 meters away (its 11th flight already!), the Perseverance rover has experienced something very mysterious: after collecting the first sample of rock, engineers discovered that the tube was empty. Something went wrong but engineers are still trying to figure out what… what a mystery!
The Chinese Zhurong rover keeps driving towards the 1km milestone. Already in the 800m marks, it has overcome the dangerous terrain it came across last week.
Commercial updates
Disappointing news coming from Boeing this week: they have indefinitely postponed their Starliner launch to the ISS due to a technical problem with a valve… what a pity!
Got change? $450.000 is the final price Virgin Galactic is going to charge tourists customers to fly to space starting next year.
Commercial companies in China keep making progress. While we know that the flight test of the third Hyperbola-1 commercial carrier rocket was unsuccessful, Deep Blue aerospace performed a successful 10m take-off and landing test with the Nebula-M, preceding a 100-m hop next. Definitely following SpaceX in the right direction.
iSpace, the Japanese company building commercial moon landers, raised $46 million this week. This is key for them to keep making progress towards becoming fully operational and fund missions 1, 2, and 3 to the moon in 2022, 2022, and 2023. Go, iSpace!
Tiny exoplanet!
Researchers announced this week they’ve likely found the smallest exoplanet ever. Just 35 light-years away from us, we keep learning about new exoplanets we’ve never been capable of studying due to various limiting factors. You can read more about this exciting discovery here.
Upcoming launches & events
Very well packed week ahead!
Tue Aug 10th - Antares 230+ | Cygnus CRS NG-16 USA
Thu Aug 12nd - ISRO GSLV Mk II | EOS-03 India
Sun Aug 15th - Soyuz 2.1v | EMKA Russia
Sun Aug 15th - Vega | Pléiades Neo 4
And that’s it for this week! :)
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut
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Unfortunately, it seems Boeing's OFT-2 problem envolves *several* valves... 😔
Unfortunately, it seems Boeing's OFT-2 problem envolves *several* valves... 😔