Space Explored

Axiom Space has assembled the first private crew bound for the International Space Station. Three investors turned Axiom customers will join a former NASA astronaut to conduct a non-government mission in space. The mission dubbed Ax-1 will rely on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft to transport the four men to and from the space station.

On the heals of their first successful launch into orbit earlier this month, Virgin Orbit has been selected to send a new payload for the Royal Netherlands Royal Air Force called BRIK-II, a payload named after the their first airplane.

Super Bowl 55 is just around the corner, set to take place on February 7 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. But this year, the Super Bowl will be a bit special with a first-of-its-kind Air Force Global Strike flyover.

Boeing is positioned to start flying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA as soon as this year, but the Starliner spacecraft must complete an orbital flight test without crew. NASA and Boeing now have a new date set for when the OFT-2 mission will be conducted. If successful, Boeing’s Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in transporting astronauts from the U.S. to the ISS for NASA’s Commercial Crew program.

This week the Space Explored team unpack’s NASA’s unexpected SLS Green Run hot fire test ending, the latest status update on SpaceX’s Starship SN9 flight plans, this week in Space Coast launches, and much more.

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Yes, you read that title correctly; Biden does indeed have a moon rock in the Oval Office. As pointed out by The Washington Post, the moon rock is sitting on a bookshelf and is “intended to remind Americans of the ambition and accompaniments of earlier generations.”

Consuming food aboard the International Space Station (ISS) can be a rather tricky task, but luckily, NASA can regularly send more food up. However, when future missions begin calling for astronauts to travel farther out into space, that won’t be an option. Enter the “Deep Space Food Challenge.”

After the SLS Core Stage hot fire test that aborted just over a minute into the test, it was uncertain what objectives were met and if they would need to do a second test fire. During the second press conference Tuesday afternoon, concerns arose about the Core Stage reaching its cryo-cycling limit before the launch but today NASA shares the Core Stage and Artemis 1 timeline may be in better shape than first thought.

Still in the afterglow of Blue Origin’s 14th flight of its New Shepard rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space tourism venture is planning another suborbital rocket launch to keep the momentum going in 2021. According to reports, these next missions could be some of the biggest in the company’s history.

Friday morning SpaceX plans to launch their first dedicated ridesharing mission. Ahead of the launch, one of the Sentinel-2 Earth-observing satellites conveniently passed over the landing zone for the mission while showing SpaceX’s fleet ready to perform their rocket-catching duties.

Rocket Lab kicked off their 2021 mission schedule with a dedicated launch of a communication satellite for OHB Group into a polar orbit. The Electron rocket lifted off early Wednesday, January 20, from their launch complex in New Zealand.

On December 15, the US Air Force used artificial intelligence (AI) to control a Lockheed U-2 spy plane’s radar and sensor systems. This marked the first time that AI was given control of any US military system.

NASA released a statement this week detailing information about some of the findings that contributed to the early shutdown of the Artemis 1 Core Stage during the Green Run Hot Fire test on Saturday. The test was originally supposed to last about 8 minutes, but ended up only lasting 67.2 seconds, far short of the minimum amount of time needed to certify the core.

Since October, SpaceX has been slowly rolling out public beta access to its Starlink internet service, and the latest countries to get access are the UK and Canada. People who live in those countries can now sign up for the public beta and have a Starlink user terminal shipped to them.

SpaceX successfully launched its latest Starlink mission today while setting a new record for reusing a Falcon 9 first stage booster. Starlink is SpaceX’s growing satellite internet service, and SpaceX uses these missions to deploy up to 60 of its own satellites into orbit as test beds for pushing booster re-flight records.

Vaonis is a French company that just unveiled its latest astrophotography tool, a smart telescope called Vespera. An improvement over the company’s previous smart telescope, Stellina, Vespara just won the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for digital imaging and photography.

Remember when SpaceX’s Starship SN9 was supposed to be a quick static fire then 12.5 km hop? Yeah, seems like that is fully out the window for this vehicle at least. Another week went by full of hope to see a flight by the end of the week, but again we are back to waiting for a static fire to be completed.

NASA recently submitted a permit detailing facility construction and modification plans to support its next Mobile Launch Platform for Space Launch System, the agency’s nearly complete rocket to the Moon. We first have to go back to where SLS all started with the Constellation program to understand why NASA is building a new Mobile Launch Platform.

The current Mobile Launcher, ML-1, was initially built for the Constellation program between 2009 and 2010. When the Constellation program was canned in October 2010, NASA started reworking ML-1 to support their new program for the Space Launch System. With the increased complexity and weight of SLS, issues quickly began to arise.

In December 2019, Boeing’s Starliner crew ship failed to reach the International Space Station (ISS) during its Orbital Flight Test mission. Later it was discovered that multiple errors in Starliner’s software caused the failure. Because of this, if Boeing wanted to test Starliner again, its software would need to achieve a formal requalification.

NASA invited media to Kennedy Space Center to witness the progress being made with the stacking of the SLS Solid Rocket Motors and to see the Orion Crew Capsule as it is being prepared to be moved to one of the final processing facilities before being stacked later this year.