Derek Wise

This week, SpaceX’s new ships arrived in Florida while Firefly had their first launch that ended in failure. Virgin Galactic has been grounded by the FAA along with more Top stories this week.

Ingenuity recently completed its 13th flight on Mars. Mars helicopter campaign extended from the initially planned 5 flights and is now serving as a valuable tool to assist with route planning for the Perseverance rover.

SpaceX plans to start catching their Starship Super Heavy booster have raised eyebrows. Those Starship catch attempts should start with Booster 5, the second Super Heavy booster to launch, Elon confirmed in a tweet this week. Along with this, news about Starlink satellite’s laser interconnects and development at Starbase.

The second of SpaceX’s new support ships, Bob, arrived in the Port of Tampa Saturday. Leaving Port Fourchon after it sustained a direct hit from Hurricane Ida last weekend.

A recent Jigsaw report raised concerns over the growing number of government-engineered internet outages across the world. With over 850 government-engineered internet outages in the past decade, citizens of affected nations are desperate for a solution. SpaceX Starlink and similar satellite internet services could potentially help overcome these outages in ways that legacy connectivity cannot.

On Twitter today, Inspiration4 shared a first real look at the Dragon capsule’s cupola that will allow them to have an immersive view of the Earth below throughout the mission.

Following a successful flight to space, Richard Branson announced that Virgin Galactic is partnering with Omaze for a trip giveaway for you and a guest.

Updated as Starlink surpasses 100k user terminals shipped.

SpaceX has been launching so many Starlink missions they have become a regular occurrence on Florida’s Space Coast. With this many launches, it has become hard to keep track of all the important moments from the Starlink program. We have both a timeline of major events; and a table of every Starlink launch at the bottom of the article.

In SpaceX’s most recent Falcon user’s guide, they released more detailed information about the long-awaited extended payload fairings was released; and it seems that these larger fairing halves will not be recovered.

This week, SpaceX has continued their work at Starbase, 34 more OneWeb satellites were launched into orbit, and SLS has gained its Orion mass simulator.

This week, Tesla has been a mainstay of the news. Their AI day served as a recruitment tool as they unveiled their Dojo super-computer and a Tesla robot.

Relativity Space is one of a growing number of private spaceflight companies that hope to bring a rocket to market soon. They plan to conduct the first launch of their Terran 1 rocket early next year.

Earlier today, 34 more OneWeb satellites were lifted into orbit on a Soyuz rocket that launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, this being the company’s 9th launch.

Since Elon first tweeted about a larger high-bay coming to SpaceX’s Starbase we’ve been waiting for construction to begin. At last, the ground has been broken to start construction of the largest building yet at Starbase.

At Tesla’s AI day yesterday, they shared a first look at a new Humanoid Tesla robot. Currently, in Boca Chica, Texas, they make use of two Boston Dynamics Spot robots to augment their work while developing Starship. This raises the question: could this new Tesla robot take the place of Spot down in Starbase?

Next month, Walt Disney World will open Space 220, a brand new restaurant in Epcot. Dubbed the “ultimate culinary exploration” by Disney, guests enter a space elevator and travel 220 miles up to a space station to enjoy their meal.

SpaceX has acquired two new ships to work on fairing recovery, Starliner will be destacked from Atlas, and a Cygnus spacecraft launched to the ISS.

While Blue Origin continues to attack SpaceX’s award of the Human Lander System contract for Artemis, SpaceX remains hard at work towards the first orbital launch from their “non-existent” spaceport. More so, Elon has criticized Bezos for holding back the Artemis program in the very ways that Bezos has previously spoken against.

This week SpaceX has made massive progress towards launching their Super Heavy rocket. Last week the booster was a mere tube in the build site, but now it has had the engines installed and been stacked with Starship 20; now laden with tiles.

According to forms filed with the FCC, SpaceX has acquired Swarm technologies. Swarm uses their pico-satellites to provide low-cost data plans for internet of things devices, so the acquisition by SpaceX could be beneficial for both SpaceX and Swarm customers.

This week, SpaceX has added the final section to the orbital Starship launch tower, integrated the orbital launch table, and completed a great deal of work on their first Superheavy booster slated for flight, booster 4.