The Space Roundup - Jan 16th, 2022
Get ready for another week of space awesomeness!
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3, 2, 1, zero! Lift-off!
Gas stations in space
Orbit Fab, the company offering refueling services in space, has signed an contract with Astroscale to refuel its life-extension satellites in orbit. With this orbital refueling service, these amazing Astroscale satellites will be able to help many more satellites extend their missions by fixing, repositioning, accelerating or de-orbiting them (to eliminate space debris).
This is extremely interesting for the ever-growing orbital economy, as it definitely changes how missions are planned: no more fuel? Please, stop and refuel to continue with your mission. Awesome!
Virgin Orbit success!
Virgin Orbit successfully launched the LauncherOne rocket, carrying 11 satellites to a 500-kilometer orbit. Remember this rocket is launched from a Boing747 airplane (called Cosmic Girl). Apart from being a very important milestone for the company, which has recently gone public, it was carrying several very interesting experiments and tech demonstrations such as water thrusters for satellite propulsion in space and a new system to help cubesats dock with others magnetically (you can read more about some of these experimental sats here)
SpaceX rideshare mission
This is not the only successful launch of experiments and tests this week. SpaceX has launched a rideshare mission with more than 100 different satellites from big and small organizations, including multinationals, startups, universities… all kind of innovative ideas bringing progress to all of us and getting to space in a single rocket launch. This is one of the major impacts SpaceX’s having in the industry: bringing down launch costs to a mere $5000 per kilogram (almost any organization can afford that!) it’s truly opening more and more opportunities to inexpensively send experiments to space. I can’t imagine the impact this is going to have in the very close future of space exploration.
For the concrete booster used for this mission, it was its tenth launch and landing in 19 months. That is flying every 45 days! That is what makes it possible to be so affordable. Great.
New boy in town
Last week Astra, the new American launch vehicle company, announced that it's going to deploy its first satellite in orbit for NASA this same month. And this time it won’t be launched from Alaska, like the previous tests, but from Cape Canaveral. It’s going to be a historical moment for the company and it’s going to happen so soon! Go, Astra!
Moon update: Water!
For the first time in history China's Chang'e 5 lunar lander was able to detect water on the moon at its landing site in real time. This hasn’t been possible up to know, but a team of engineers was able to “filter out the noise” provoked by the sun heat that was preventing the sensors to read the information from below the spacecraft. Finally, they could identify the water signature , which so far could only be measured from lunar orbit or in the labs back on Earth. This is very a important step in the ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) world.
Pic of the week
Double strike! Today I’m sharing a picture of Mars taken by ExoMars-TGO several months ago. If you look at the left side of the pic you’ll see a rare figure: a double crater, provoked by a double meteorite impact. Aroud the craters you can also see material ejected by the massive impact. Beautiful!
Extra!
If you like this space newsletter you might also want to check Steve’s “The Convo Kit”, a weekly newsletter about tech, space, and science sent out every Saturday. Check it out and enjoy!
Launches of the week
The following launches are scheduled for this week:
Sunday, Jan 16th - Long March 4C
Tuesday, Jan 18th - Starlink Group 4-6 | Falcon 9 Block 5
Friday, Jan 21st - USSF-8 | Atlas V 511
And that’s it for this week!
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut