The Space Roundup - Nov 21st, 2021

Hello, hello, my dear space lovers!
Are you ready for yet another week of space awesomeness?

Morning Brew is a daily newsletter that keeps you informed and entertained, for free. Click here to subscribe!

Quick note: if you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t miss an issue by subscribing below to receive your weekly dose of space awesomeness:

Ah! And if you want to sponsor this newsletter, drop me an email.

3, 2, 1, zero! Lift-off!

New orbital success!

This week we have a new member of the orbital family: Astra made it! In their fourth attempt, they successfully made their rocket reach an astonishing height of 500 kilometers (100kms higher than the ISS, for your reference). Wow! Go, Astra!

Spanish Innovation

Yeah, a bit of national pride here :) The Spanish startup Pangea successfully tested this week the first MethaLox aerospike engine in the world. This type of engine can have a massive impact on the amount of propellant needed to take a payload to orbit (and therefore the price and weight). This can be truly revolutionary if applied to heavy rockets such as SpaceX’s and others. Imagine a 15% cost/propellant reduction on a reusable rocket that is already orders of magnitude cheaper compared to other players in the industry. Revolutionary!

SpaceX updates

Talking about SpaceX, this week Elon Musk has been sharing a lot of details on his plans. First, he feels pretty confident Starship will fly in January 2022. Then he wants to launch about a dozen Starships during the year, taking real payloads to orbit by 2023. After that, they’d need to focus on propellant transfer in orbit and then on going to the Moon for the Artemis missions they have been assigned. All this while also planning to use Starships as building blocks for a permanent human base on Mars (Mars Base Alpha) … wooooow. What an exciting vision they have!!!

Looking for habitable planets

Australian scientists have announced a new mission to search for close habitable planets near us. It is called TOLIMAN and will focus on the closest stars to identify exoplanets that might host life. Interesting!

Russians playing with fire

Yeah, the Russians have done something really dangerous this week: in order to test a new defense missile, they shot one of their satellites in orbit and destroyed it. The problem? It generated a debris cloud that caused a serious alarm for the ISS crew. This is so dangerous and this debris is going to remain in orbit for many years to come. Sadly, several other nations performed similar tests like this one in the past and we keep making the space debris issue worse and worse. I wish there was an international agreement not to pollute space anymore so that space is still accessible and not a dirty dumpster :(

$1.4 billion for Sierra Space!

Sierra Space has announced they’ve raised $1.4 billion from private investors with two goals in mind: making progress on the Dream Chaser (a reusable vehicle to take humans and cargo to the ISS by the end of next year) and LIFE, the big inflatable modules they want to deliver to the upcoming commercial space station “Orbital Reef”. I sincerely hope they make progress on these two foundational components of their vision. Very interesting, indeed!

Pic of the week

This is the latest picture captured by the Hubble telescope this week. It is a nebula in the constellation Aquila

Launches of the week 

Watch out! What a week full of rocket launches! YAY! :)

• Tuesday, Nov 23rd - China Long March 2C/YZ-1S

• Wednesday, Nov 24th - NASA DART | SpaceX Falcon 9 

• Wednesday, Nov 24th -  Roscosmos “Prichal” | Soyuz 2.1b

• Wednesday, Nov 24th - China Long March 3B | ChinaSat 6D 

• Thursday, Nov 25th - Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat | EKS 5 (Tundra 5) 

• Saturday, Nov 27th - Rocket Lab Electron | A Data With Destiny

And that’s it for this week!

If you like the Space Roundup please share it with others and if you want to support the project, please go to Patreon to see available subscription options starting from as little as $3/month.

Cheers from sunny Spain!

Juan, the Curious Astronaut