Boeing Starliner is scheduled for its first crewed launch on May 6. The history of this spacecraft is MESSY — here’s the full story on why it’s seven years late.
Newsletter edition goes out tomorrow morning, sign up: adastraspace.com
In spaceflight news today, China is about to launch three of its astronauts on Shenzhou 18 towards the Tiangong space station: liftoff is in about 7 minutes from now.
Should be going on CGTN within the next hour to talk about the mission & international collaboration in space exploration.
The latter is certainly an interesting question given the current geopolitical context 😬
If you want one newsletter per week rounding up the biggest spaceflight + space science news, please sign up for Ad Astra! Weekly newsletter will go out tomorrow morning.
"
MethaneSAT jetzt im Orbit, nachdem SpaceX .. Mission .. gestartet hat. .. Satellit .. von einer gemeinnützigen Umweltorganisation entwickelt .., wird Methanemissionen erkennen, .. ebnet damit den Weg für mehr Verantwortlichkeit und eine schnellere Reduzierung. Eine Pressemitteilung des Environmental Defense Fund.
" https://www.raumfahrer.net/environmental-defense-fund-methanesat-jetzt-im-orbit/
A daring mission to revive a defunct NASA telescope? Let's talk about Spitzer Resurrector and speculate on why the Space Force (and not NASA!) is interested in this mission.
Transferring around 80GB of videos from my phone to a backup drive: lots of interesting things taken over the past three years or so.
Here's one: my view of Ariane 5 VA256 in the BAF at CSG Kourou in French Guiana on 23 December 2021, with #JWST on top, ahead of rollout to launch pad ELA-3 & their flight into space legend on Christmas Day.
The reason I didn’t do any live posting about the Starship launch is I was frantically working on this. Here's my take on the launch (including video from the launch and flight because WOW SpaceX put on a good show here)
Gwynne Shotwell’s #SpaceX did incredible work today. #Starship is a monster!!! Including the 1st stage booster, it stands ~120m tall. What an absolute unit.
If you call today's launch a “failure”, you have no idea how experimentation works.
Look, I honestly think EM is a terrible person, and I'd wager that his personal contributions to SpaceX's progress over the last few years have been minimal – while the rest of the company has been working their collective asses off.
Just got the email confirmation from SpaceX -- Starship's third test launch is set for tomorrow morning. Checked with the FAA, and yep, there's the launch license:
Via Mike Acs on Flickr, an image of what I believe was the proposed Saturn MLV-11.5 configuration -- basically a Saturn IB with four five-segment solid boosters strapped to it.
The idea was to hit a middle spot for payload between the IB's 18.6 tonnes and the Saturn V's 118 -- around 40 tonnes.
My weekly space news show Ad Astra is here! Have 10 minutes? Then you can hear about my favorite space, space science, and space flight stories this week.
I’m serious @nasa I know you are all about the science and doing it low cost but just think of the PR potential. Sure Orion and Mars and the Moon are pretty sexy but you’ve got all us Gen Xers who where in grade school when #voyager launched and did thier slingshots, not to mention all the #startrek fans. I would love to see a resurection of the Voyager program. #spaceexploration#spaceflight#spacecraft
Ever wondered what it sounds like when you close the door of a 11 metre wide, 9 metre deep, & 16.4 metre high concrete chamber?
Wonder no more – my Test Centre colleague, Jan Demming, demonstrates the ~20 second reverb time of the Large European Acoustic Facility at ESA's ESTEC today 🙉
Normally used to test satellites under the enormously loud conditions of launch, we were in the LEAF today for quite a different purpose 😉