Today’s flyby will be the first to significantly ‘tilt’ the spacecraft’s orbit and allow it to see the Sun’s polar regions, which cannot be seen from Earth.
Huh, it never occurred to me that we haven’t seen what the Sun looks like from above or below the plane of the solar system.
Why not invest in a bunch of the smaller companies like Rocket Factory Ausburg, PLD Space, MaiaSpace, HyImpulse, etc? They won’t all be successful, but if just a couple of them are, the competition would put Europe in a much stronger position than if they were to establish Euro-ULA.
I’m not sure we can afford an “either or” strategy.
We should be doing that, we should be doing euro-ULA, and we should be massively expanding (access to) launch infrastructure. There’s only so much you can do when your ranges are literally on the other side of the planet.
It is crucial to ensure that the following already agreed-upon elements remain unchanged through to implementation:
[…]
3. A Shift in Mindset – Need for Speed: To compete globally, Europe must embrace a cultural shift towards speed and innovation. Laws and regulations should be evaluated based on their ability to accelerate progress, with speed as the primary KPI. […]
This doesn’t seem like a great idea when dealing with rockets…It’s wasteful, immediately hazardous to any crews, and eventually (if not also immediately) harmful to the environment with any wreckage and other pollution that may be produced. And this is from someone that supports space initiatives and research.
It’s wasteful, immediately hazardous to any crews, and eventually (if not also immediately) harmful to the environment with any wreckage and other pollution that may be produced.
Interesting, I interpret “Europe must embrace a cultural shift towards speed and innovation” in almost exactly the opposite way.
Ariane 6 was essentially an outdated design before it even launched. All of the major American and Chinese launch companies are operating or developing reusable rockets. The launch startups which wrote the open letter are some of the only European organizations actively pursuing reusability, something Arianespace has ignored for far too long.
Argonaut will be a multi-role lunar lander capable of delivering up to 1,800 kilograms of cargo to the surface of the Moon.
According to a Phase A/B1 development document published in July 2024, ESA is targeting 2031 for the launch of the first Argonaut mission. The lander is set to launch aboard an ArianeGroup Ariane 64 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre.
I love that we launched a spacecraft with the sole purpose of measuring the positions of as many stars as possible, just because we could. Well done Gaia, and all the teams who worked on it.
A quick search says final, because it is supposed to enter Mercury’s orbit late this year and then split into two different spacecrafts: Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter
Smaller than a strawberry seed, this tiny signal amplifier was produced by the European Space Agency to fill a missing link in current technology, helping to make future radar-observing and telecommunications space missions feasible.
“This integrated circuit is a low noise amplifier, measuring just 1.8 by 0.9 mm across,” explains ESA microwave engineer David Cuadrado-Calle. “Delivering state of the art performance, the low noise amplifier’s task is to boost very faint signals to usable levels.”
They eat cod in space? I mean, the Portuguese eat a lot of cod. They have a bajillion recipes, generally amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love eating in Portugal, but I imagine that cod must have been a part of the navy selection process. Could be that they have developed a space-ready Belem cakes. If so the astronauts are fucked. They’ll return fat as fuck! Those things are addictive.
Even in the highly volatile IT market big corporations move like dinosaurs. Upper management changes usually do not affect the actual business being done, except for management-related things. I don’t think aerospace corporations are any different.
According to the Themis plans there will be a flight envelope test next year (reusable first stage).
CALLISTO was delayed to sometime in 2025 to 2026 (it’s a testing and evaluation platform so not an actually usable product but something that could lead to usable products in the future, it is also not entirely European).
There might also be Ariane Next replacing Ariane 6 sometime in the 2030s but will only be partially reusable.
All of those are in planning/development since 2020 (which is coincidentally the year in wich Falcon 9 became commercially available).
I wouldn’t have imagined that nearly a decade later, Falcon 9/Heavy would still be the only reusable orbital launch vehicle. The entire launch industry is playing catch up.
2020 (which is coincidentally the year in wich Falcon 9 became commercially available
Falcon 9 has been flying commercial missions since 2013, no? I think CASSIOPE was the first…
Falcon 9 has been flying commercial missions since 2013, no?
At least not with humans, according to this Article from 2020:
Space history has been made. On 30 May, SpaceX and NASA launched two astronauts to space aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft, the first time a private company has flown humans into orbit, and the first crewed launch from the US since the end of the space shuttle programme in 2011.
“This is the first time that SpaceX has ever launched astronauts, and it’s also the first time that a government has trusted a commercial company to launch astronauts to orbit,” says space consultant Laura Forczyk. “It is a big deal.”
Ah, I didn’t realize you were referring exclusively to crewed missions. Yes, you are correct, the first crewed Falcon 9 launch was in 2020. The flew plenty of uncrewed commercial missions prior to that, though.
It seems like crewed European launch vehicles have a similarly slow timeline to reusable European launch vehicles.
esa
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