Space Explored

NASA’s Launch Services Program is designed to help launch uncrewed rockets that deliver spacecraft into orbit or farther out into the universe. The latest company to benefit from the program is Blue Origin, as NASA has announced that the company will be awarded a Launch Services II contract.

Many of you have probably never heard the name Nicole Jordan despite her being instrumental in the recent Crew-1 mission. She was the mission manager for the launch, bringing together all the different departments to make sure that it went off without a hitch, which, thanks to her, it did.

SpaceX was met with disbelief in 2011 when they announced plans to vertically land Falcon 9 rocket boosters. This was largely thought to be impossible, and some industry titans bet SpaceX wouldn’t achieve it. Almost a decade later, SpaceX still amazes us with their rocket booster landings.

The most crowd pleasing and recently less common are Return To Launch/Landing Site (RTLS) landings, and the next is set to happen tomorrow. SpaceX is positioned to complete the next Falcon 9 first stage booster RTLS landing on December 17 as part of the NROL-108 mission.

The European Space Agency (ESA) held a council meeting today to discuss the maintenance and changes due to take place at Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana for 2020 through 2024. During this meeting, a contract was signed by the ESA and National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), agreeing to “maintain and modernize” the spaceport.

The Starliner team is gearing up to conduct the next uncrewed orbital flight test for the astronaut-carrying spacecraft, and Boeing has revealed a thoughtful mission patch that symbolizes how personal the mission is for everyone involved.

NASA’s Near Earth Object Surveyor spacecraft currently has its development on standby as it awaits a Key Decision Point (KDP) B review. The review has been postponed until the spring of 2021 due to future budget uncertainties.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft has been in the news quite a bit lately because of the essential role it will soon play in sending astronauts to the moon. However, most don’t realize that Orion is 15 years old and has gone through a complex and expensive development, even coming close to being canceled at one point.

Minister Navdeep Bains announced today that two Canadian astronauts will fly on two crewed Artemis flights starting with the first astronaut on NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the Moon since Apollo 17.

Astra has worked all year to send its rocket to space, and the small satellite launch company finally pulled it off on Tuesday. Astra’s Rocket 3.2 vehicle lifted off from Astra Spaceport at the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska, and passed the Karman line for the first time.

The year 2020 has been record breaking for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), with 35 licensed commercial space launches. Of course, there will also likely be even more launches achieved before year’s end, probably bringing the number close to 40.

On Monday, for the first time in six years, Russia performed a test flight of the Angara-5 rocket. The test was conducted at 8:50 Moscow Time, and saw the rocket head for a near-geosynchronous orbit carrying a test payload.

After nine years of designing, building, and testing, Airbus’ European Service Module (ESM) has finished its Acceptance Review and was formally handed over to NASA on December 11. Now it is officially NASA’s property and they will be in charge of keeping it ready for when it will fly.

A newly published paper in the preprint service arXiv discusses the possibility and challenges of developing a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel at a quarter of the speed of light. More specifically, the paper analyzes three cutting edge technologies that could make such a spacecraft possible.

Lead by the University of Texas at Austin, a team of engineering students from several universities across the country will look into changing how we place sensors on hypersonic aircraft to learn more about how they fly.

With reusing rockets becoming the new trend in spaceflight, it’s no surprise that the European Space Agency (ESA) is developing the capability for themselves. The development is spurred on by the same reason as everyone else: cost savings. The ability to reuse a booster turns into savings for the manufacturer and lowers cost to orbit for the customer.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch is a big name in space. Koch completed the first all-female spacewalk with Jessica Meir in 2019, and she’s one of nine female astronauts who could be the first woman to walk on the Moon. As SURFER explores in their final issue, Christina Koch is also an experienced Texas surfer — a sport she says isn’t too unlike spacewalking.

Rocket Lab will kick off its 17th Electron launch this morning with its “The Owls Night Begins” mission. Currently, liftoff is scheduled to occur at 2:09 a.m. PST/5:09 a.m. ET from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand.

NASA has announced that technicians working on assembling the X-59 airplane completed a major milestone in its construction back on November 5. On that day, technicians were successfully able to close up the airplane’s wing, encasing interior components that will never be touched by human hands again.

JAXA recovered its Hayabusa 2 mission return capsule on December 5, and today they were able to confirm they did recover samples from the asteroid Ryugu.

NASA and ESA have announced which three astronauts will train and become crew members for SpaceX Crew-3 mission in 2021. The mission, which is expected to launch sometime in the fall next year, will carry the three selected astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft.