The Space Roundup - Mar 27th, 2022

Hello, hello, my dear space lovers!

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Are you ready for yet another week of space awesomeness? 3, 2, 1, zero! Lift-off!

NASA’s getting nervous…

Now that NASA is getting nervous about the end of the ISS, they have asked the commercial companies working on commercial stations if they could go faster with additional funding… but there are things money can’t buy, and it seems most of those companies agree these things take time. 9 Women Can't Make a Baby in a Month :)

Something that they want to foster is healthy competition amongst the commercial players, so they have decided is that they will fund a second company to work on a Lunar Lander so that they can compete against SpaceX as part of the Artemis mission. Blue Origin? Dynetics? We’ll see who this money is for

SpaceX’s innovation

SpaceX did something very cool this week. Althought this has yet to be confirmed, it seems it added a Starlink satellites dispenser to the Starship prototype. Interesting! This means they are already testing ways for the Starship to start delivering satellites on their trips to orbit. We don’t know if that prototype will even fly yet, but this is the kind of innovation and quick iteration that is blowing the industry’s minds. Go, SpaceX!

A new cosmic map maker

Progress on the plans to launch the next cosmic map maker! NASA’s SPHEREx will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos. Launch date, April 2025. Nice!

And a new martian drone!

Sener Aerospacial is going to build a martian drone for the ESA! Following the steps of NASA’s Ingenuity and everything we’ve learned from this experience, this company has been awarded a contract to develop the next flying machine for the red planet.

Successful spacewalk

ISS astronauts Raja Chari and Matthias Maurer successfully performed the final spacewalk of Expedition 66.

JWST, one step closer

All 18 mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope are now correctly aligned! This is a very important milestone for the telescope.

Pic of the week

This week I share the first image of a black hole that we captured a couple of years ago. I bring it today because Netflix has released a documentary about how it was achieved. Hundreds of astronomers around the world and many observatories were needed to capture it. Truly amazing. I highly recommend watching it

Here’s the Netflix link: Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know

Launch of the week

Here are the launches planned for this week. Plenty of them!!!!! Yuhuuu!

• Tuesday, March 29th - China, Long March 11 | Unknown Payload

• Tuesday, March 29th - China, Long March 6 | Unknown Payload

• Tuesday, March 29th - Blue Origin, New Shepard | NS-20

• Thursday, Match 31st - Zhuque-2 | Maiden Flight

• Friday, April 1st - Rocket Lab, Without Mission A Beat | Electron

• Friday, April 1st - SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 4 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare)

• Sunday, April 3rd - SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 | Axiom Space Mission 1

And that’s it for this week!

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Cheers from sunny Spain!

Juan, the Curious Astronaut