SOYUZ BRINGS THREE SPACE STATION FLIERS BACK TO EARTH - One week after two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut arrived at the International Space Station, the three crew members they’re replacing strapped into their own Soyuz spacecraft, undocked and returned to Earth Wednesday with a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 196-day mission. Descending under a huge orange-and-white parachute, the Soyuz crew module touched down at 10:54 p.m. EDT (8:54 a.m. Thursday local time), three-and-a-half hours after departing the lab complex.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Oct 22)

SPACEX IS WORKING WITH MICROSOFT TO BUILD A SATELLITE NETWORK THAT CAN DETECT THE LAUNCH OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS - paceX has tapped Azure, a massive cloud-computing service built by Microsoft, to help it develop and operate experimental satellites capable of detecting missile launches all over the world. Microsoft revealed its partnership with SpaceX on Tuesday as part of its larger announcement of new modular datacenters, or shipping-container-like platforms crammed with cloud-computing resources that can be deployed to remote areas of the world.   More
(Source: Business Insider - Oct 22)

COMPANY ADVANCES PLAN FOR PRIVATE CITIZEN FLIGHT TO SPACE STATION - Houston-based Axiom Space is negotiating final details of a contract with NASA to fly a private citizen to the International Space Station in 2021. The company's CEO, Michael Suffredini, said the mission is fully funded, and not by governments. "We're just about done with our contract with NASA, so we expect that to be complete here in the next two to three weeks," Suffredini said last week during an online panel discussion sponsored by International Astronautical Congress.   More
(Source: UPI.com - Oct 21)

SPACE-STATION CREW MEMBERS JUST FOUND AN ELUSIVE AIR LEAK BY WATCHING TEA LEAVES FLOAT IN MICROGRAVITY - The International Space Station has been leaking an unusual amount of air since September 2019. At first, crew members held off on troubleshooting the issue, since the leak wasn't major. But in August, the leak rate increased, prompting astronauts and cosmonauts on board the orbiting laboratory to start trying to locate its source in earnest.   More
(Source: Business Insider - Oct 20)

LEOLABS INDICATES NO COLLISION OF SOVIET SATELLITE AND CHINESE ROCKET STAGE - Most of the aerospace world watched the skies over Antarctica and New Zealand for portions of Thursday night/Friday morning. Earlier this week, LeoLabs Inc, a company that tracks objects in Low Earth Orbit, issued a statement regarding two large objects which posed a “high risk” of collision at 00:56:40 UTC on 16 October 2020 (8:56:40 pm EDT on 15 October). Roughly one hour after the time of possible collision, LeoLabs confirmed “No indication of collision” via a statement on Twitter.   More
(Source: NASASpaceFlight.com - Oct 18)

SPACEX LAUNCHES ANOTHER BATCH OF STARLINK SATELLITES - SpaceX launched 60 more Starlink internet relay platforms into orbit Sunday as the company ramps up network testing in Washington state and touts a streak of nearly 300 satellites launched since June without a spacecraft failure. Nine Merlin 1D engines fired up and powered the Falcon 9 rocket off pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:25:57 a.m. EDT (1225:57 GMT) Sunday, marking the 14th Falcon 9 mission dedicated to deploying satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Oct 18)

COSMONAUTS PATCH SMALL AIR LEAK ON INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION: REPORTS - Cosmonauts are making progress in the fight against the small air leak that has beleaguered the International Space Station for months, according to Russian reports. The leak was first detected in September 2019 but was too low a priority for NASA and Roscosmos to address until August of this year given the short staffing and high activity rates at the orbiting laboratory, according to a previous statement from the U.S. space agency.   More
(Source: Space.com - Oct 17)

TWO OLD SPACECRAFT JUST AVOIDED CATASTROPHICALLY COLLIDING IN ORBIT - About 1000 kilometres above Earth’s surface, two old spacecraft have narrowly avoided a collision. If they had hit one another, the smash-up could have created a spray of debris that would be extremely dangerous for other satellites and could set off a chain reaction of collisions. The two objects are a Soviet Parus navigation satellite launched in 1989 and a Chinese rocket booster launched in 2009. Neither has any method of propulsion onboard, so there is no way to steer them away from one another.    More
(Source: New Scientist - Oct 17)

ASTRONAUTS SET TO LAUNCH SECURITY SATELLITE FROM SPACE STATION - Spire Global is a startup that is pivoting so quickly that in the past 18 months, it’s added specialties such as weather tracking and data services to its initial work on tracking ships and aircraft from orbit. Now the company has a contract with the Australian Office of National Intelligence to experiment with commercial satellite technologies, including “machine learning” — an application of artificial intelligence that allows a system to learn and improve classification from an initial dataset.   More
(Source: Forbes - Oct 17)

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