The Earth observation company announced on Wednesday that it will merge with a special purpose acquisition company and become a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.
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It’s a slow process but NASA is stacking their first Space Launch System rocket in the VAB at Kennedy Space Center. The newest part was just stacked in the last few days.
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SpaceX has been building not one but two seafaring platforms on the Gulf Coast just a few hours from each other. One is SpaceX’s newest droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, and the other is the Starship sea launch platform named Phobos. Both of which have been worked on extensively over the last few months.
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After its month-long trip, Of Course I Still Love You arrived at Port Long Beach earlier this morning. The trip isn’t officially over yet, the droneship will still need to be unloaded from its carrier vessel named Mighty Servant 1.
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This week Space Explored’s Seth Kurkowski and Derek Wise discuss SpaceX’s most recent launch, Starship’s new naming scheme, and the chaos that went on between the industry’s leaders.
After SpaceX got rid of their faring catching ships the company went through a few options for how to recover their fairings. Today their second contracted ship left Port Canaveral, leaving SpaceX again with no dedicated fairing recovery ship.
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Starting today Astra Space shares are live on the NASDAQ after merging with the special purpose acquisition company Holicity. Astra planes to use the money to grow their rocket production facilities and team.
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Today Jeff Bezos announced that Blue Origin has picked Wally Funk to join the crew that will fly on New Shepard’s first crewed flight. The legendary aviator, now 84 years old, has done everything except finally receive her chance to fly to space.
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SpaceX will launch 88 satellites into a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth. This will be SpaceX’s second dedicated rideshare mission and host companies like Spaceflight Inc, ExoLaunch, and D-Orbit who will deploy the bulk of the payloads with their specialized deployment system. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch south, down the coast of Florida, and then the first stage will perform the first RTLS landing of 2021, back at LZ-1.
Date: Wednesday, June 30th
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This morning Virgin Orbit is attempting their third flight of the LauncherOne air-launched vehicle. This will be the first operational flight of the vehicle after their successful Demo-2 mission in January.
Date: Wednesday, June 30th, 10:47 a.m. EDT (Drop and Launch)
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CEO of United Launch Alliance Tory Bruno has shared a timelapse of a key piece of ULA’s Vulcan rocket as it gets ready to start testing.
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Last Friday it was announced that Virgin Galactic was awarded their full commercial launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. The marks the beginning of their operational status for crewed sub-orbital flights to space.
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Yesterday the teams at SpaceX’s Starbase Starship facility received the first vacuum-optimized Raptor engine from Hawthorne. This is one of the most important pieces needed for an orbital Starship launch sometime this year.
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The same year the Space Shuttle launched for the final time, a game was released that made waves in space and video game communities. Kerbal Space Program helped form a generation of engineers in love with space.
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SpaceX has had great success recovering and reusing their payload fairings. In contrast, ULA doesn’t recover or reuse them, but according to CEO Tory Bruno, ULA seriously considered implementing fairing reuse, but the economics didn’t make sense.
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Space Perspective wants to be your ride to the edges of space all for the cost of $125,000. Which compared to the rumored half a million for Blue Origin’s New Shepard, it might just be the best deal. If you’re willing to compensate.
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On this day 17 years ago the age of privately funded space ventures reached a major milestone with Mojave Aerospace Ventures’ SpaceShipOne flight. Mojave Aerospace Ventures is a joint venture between Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites, largely funded by Paul Allen. This marked the first privately funded and developed crewed spaceflight and also led won Mojave Aerospace Ventures the Ansari X Prize.
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NASA’s official app is being featured as Apple’s App Of The Day. The app shows amazing imagery, 3D models of the agency’s spacecraft, and the latest NASA news.
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The United States Space Force operates the GPS constellation that we use every day to know where we are. Tomorrow, SpaceX will launch a new GPS III satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, into orbit to expand and upgrade the constellation that was been active since 1978. The launch window opens at 12:09 p.m. and lasts 15 minutes.
Date: Thursday, June 17th, 12:09 p.m. EDT
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Today NASA and SpaceX announced a new launch date for the next crew rotation on the ISS this coming fall. The new date is due to “visiting vehicle traffic” with a few missions possibly taking place around the same time.
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Beginning of this month Blue Origin announced an auction for the first seat on their New Shepard flight in July. Today marked the ending of blind bidding and the minimum price for the seat has been announced, and it’s a lot.
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Virgin Orbit has become one of the newest launch providers to come online with the success of their Demo 2 launch earlier this year. Now their first operational mission is nearing launch readiness by the end of this month.
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NASA’s SLS Core Stage arrived at Kennedy Space Center in April and has been getting final checkouts done to it in the VAB since then. Now we are nearing the final lift to assemble it with the solid rocket boosters.
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We’ve been talking recently about SpaceX’s newest droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas and that it will be replacing one of SpaceX’s droneships on the east coast. It has become pretty apparent now which droneship it will be replacing.
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