ELON MUSK WANTS TO PUT 1 MILLION AI SATELLITES IN SPACE. HERE'S HOW SPACEX COULD DO IT - SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined more details for his company’s planned data centers in space ahead of a widely anticipated IPO on Thursday (June 11) expected to make him a trillionaire. A new half-hour video offers a typical Elon Musk fireside chat about where the billionaire founder of SpaceX wa... More (Source: Space.com - Jun 12)
SPACEX LAUNCHES 24 STARLINK SATELLITES ON FALCON 9 ROCKET FROM VANDENBERG - SpaceX launched its next Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday morning, a day before the company’s stock becomes publicly available on the Nasdaq. The Starlink 17-44 mission added another 24 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation. T... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 12)
RUSSIA’S ANSWER TO STARLINK LOSES ONE OF ITS FIRST SATELLITES - Bureau 1440, the Russian company building the “Rassvet” low-Earth orbit satellite internet service, has confirmed the loss of one of its first operational satellites, launched in March. The remaining 15 satellites from the batch are functioning normally, the company said. The project – Moscow... More (Source: Kyiv Post - Jun 11)
NASA NAMES FOUR-MAN CREW TO ARTEMIS 3 MISSION - The crew of NASA’s next Artemis moon program mission was announced Tuesday, setting the stage for a flight to Earth orbit next year to test rendezvous and docking procedures with moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, a critical milestone before sending astronauts back to the moon for... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 10)
SPACE TELESCOPES ARE NOW OVERWHELMED BY SATELLITE TRAILS - Unfortunately, there's more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available on the arXiv preprint server from researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency's new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were co... More (Source: Phys.org - Jun 10)
SPACEX LAUNCHES FALCON 9 ROCKET BOOSTER ON RECORD-BREAKING 35TH FLIGHT - SpaceX continued to push its Falcon 9 rocket fleet to the next level by flying its flight leader, tail number B1067, on a record-breaking 35th flight Monday morning. It launched SpaceX’s latest batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before sunrise. The Star... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 9)
TESTS SUGGEST RUSSIAN SATELLITES CAN JAM GPS ON A CONTINENTAL SCALE - Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully we... More (Source: Ars Technica - Jun 9)
SPACEX LAUNCHES 2 STARSHIELD SATELLITES DURING SATURDAY NIGHT STARLINK MISSION - SpaceX launched a combination of 21 Starlink and two Starshield satellites on Saturday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Starshield is an alternate version of the Starlink satellite architecture the government. SpaceX hasn’t announced which U.S. government agency ordered these two satell... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 8)
ASTRONAUTS TOLD TO RETURN TO INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION AFTER SHELTERING OVER AIR LEAK REPAIRS - Astronauts have been told to return to the International Space Station (ISS) after sheltering in their spacecraft while repair works were carried out on new air leaks in the Russian segment of the station. The five crew members had been told to assume an "elevated safety posture" as two Russian c... More (Source: BBC News - Jun 6)
ASTRONAUTS ON INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION TAKE SHELTER IN SPACEX DRAGON AS COSMONAUTS TRY TO FIX AIR LEAK - NASA ordered five astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter in an attached SpaceX Dragon spacecraft today while Russian cosmonauts tried to fix a concerning air leak on the orbiting lab. "Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency's SpaceX Crew-12... More (Source: Space.com - Jun 5)
SPACEX LAUNCHES SUNRISE STARLINK MISSION FOLLOWING WEATHER SCRUB - The second time proved to be the charm as SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday morning. It came about 24 hours after a scrub on Wednesday due to poor weather that proved insurmountable. The Starlink 10-43 mission will add 29 broadband internet sa... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 5)
SPACEX LAUNCHES 24 STARLINK SATELLITES ON FALCON 9 ROCKET FROM VANDENBERG - SpaceX is set to launch a batch of its Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base Wednesday morning. The Starlink 17-47 mission added another 24 broadband internet to its low Earth orbit constellation. There are currently more than 10,000 satellite... More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jun 5)
FRENCH ASTRONAUT TO FLY TO COMMERCIAL SPACE STATION UNDER DEAL - Two French astronauts are to blast into space next year, one of whom will stay on board the world's first commercial space station, under a new deal sealed between France and the U.S. company Vast. "This confirms France's space ambitions," President Emmanuel Macron said on X late Monday after announ... More (Source: Phys.org - Jun 4)
FOR SATELLITES AS SMALL AS A BRIEFCASE, GETTING AROUND IN SPACE JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT EASIER - MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters. The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerfu... More (Source: Phys.org - Jun 3)
CHINA LAUNCHES TEST DIRECT-TO-DEVICE SATELLITES FOR MULTIPLE PROJECTS - China capped a busy month of launches by sending four new satellite internet test satellites into orbit with a workhorse hypergolic rocket. The Long March 2D lifted off at 2:07 p.m. Eastern May 30 (1807 UTC) from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. Orange exhaust briefly illuminat... More (Source: SpaceNews - Jun 2)
ROCKET GOES BOOM, SATELLITE CAMERAS ZOOM: EXPLOSIVE BLUE ORIGIN DAMAGE IS VISIBLE FROM SPACE - The dust has settled in the aftermath of last week's giant New Glenn rocket explosion, which shook Florida's Space Coast and the space industry itself. Blue Origin was conducting a fueling test on May 28, ahead of New Glenn's fourth mission, when a yet unknown event led to the total destruction o... More (Source: Space.com - Jun 2)
BLUE ORIGIN FACES MONTHS OF DELAYS AFTER ROCKET EXPLOSION DAMAGES LAUNCH PAD - Blue Origin faces a months-long setback after the explosion of a rocket damaged its launch pad, company and industry sources said, scrambling schedules for Amazon satellite launches and bolstering SpaceX's dominance in the commercial launch market. The mishap, which occurred during a test fir... More (Source: Reuters - Jun 1)
CHINA'S SHENZHOU 21 ASTRONAUTS RETURN TO EARTH AFTER BEING BRIEFLY 'STRANDED', WRAPPING UP RECORD-BREAKING MISSION - China's record-breaking, and very eventful, Shenzhou 21 astronaut mission has come to an end. The Shenzhou 21 trio returned to Earth today (May 29) from China's Tiangong space station, touching down safely at the Dongfeng Landing Site in Inner Mongolia at 8:11 a.m. EDT (1211 GMT; 8:11 p.m. China ... More (Source: Space.com - May 31)
ISS FACES ANOTHER AIR LEAK — AS CONCERNING SPACE STATION PROBLEM THAT SPRANG UP IN 2019 WON’T SEEM TO GO AWAY - The International Space Station is leaking air — again. The latest leak was confirmed by NASA last week and it follows an recurring problem that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped was resolved earlier this year, Ars Technica reported. The 27-year-old orbiting space s... More (Source: New York Post - May 31)
