Outside of several mentions in the Rocket Report newsletter dating back to 2018, Ars Technica has not devoted too much attention to covering a novel California space company named SpinLaunch. That’s because the premise is so outlandish as to almost not feel real. The company aims to build a kinetic launch system that spins a ..
Tag : space
PLD Space signs launch agreement with D-Orbit. The Spanish launch company, PLD Space, announced an agreement this week with an Italy-based space transportation company, D-Orbit. As part of the agreement, D-Orbit’s ION orbital transfer vehicle will launch on PLD Space’s forthcoming rocket, the Miura 5. Although the announcement did not specify terms of the agreement, ..
Four years later, citing budget issues and cost overruns with the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA ended its participation in ExoMars. This was a bitter decision for European space policy officials to swallow, and it pushed them to strengthen ties to Roscosmos. The Russians became major partners, contributing not just a launch vehicle but also ..
Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor and economy minister, said Europe’s “unhindered access to space is strategically crucial.” “With the first launch of Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket, Germany has impressively demonstrated that it is an important location for the development of innovative space technologies,” Habeck wrote on LinkedIn. “The first flight provided important data and experience ..
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could ..
More than half a year after an empty Starliner spacecraft safely landed in a New Mexico desert, NASA and Boeing still have not decided whether the vehicle’s next flight will carry any astronauts. In an update this week, the US space agency said it is still working through the process to certify Starliner for human ..
Welcome to Edition 7.37 of the Rocket Report! It’s been interesting to watch how quickly European officials have embraced ensuring they have a space launch capability independent of other countries. A few years ago, European government satellites regularly launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, and more recently on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from the United States. ..
“$10 billion in the near term, plussing up our current resources, we can spend that,” Saltzman said. “We can jump start that, and then you get into that steady state kind of growth that’s necessary to continue to add the capabilities, continue to close the programs. So that’s what we’re really trying to sell inside ..
Three weeks ago, NASA revealed that a shipping container protecting a Cygnus spacecraft sustained “damage” while traveling to the launch site in Florida. Built by Northrop Grumman, Cygnus is one of two Western spacecraft currently capable of delivering food, water, experiments, and other supplies to the International Space Station. This particular Cygnus mission, NG-22, had ..
In recent years, the US military has made much of a concept known as tactically responsive launch. This essentially means that if there is some rapidly developing threat in space—say an adversary takes out a key national defense satellite—the military would like the capability to rapidly fuel a satellite on Earth, mate it to a ..
