esa

It is difficult to see Airbus and some of the other large, institutional space companies in Europe banding together and becoming nimble and more efficient operators in spaceflight. That would require enormous changes in companies that have decades of ossified culture, with layers of management that are difficult to cut through.

Can I ask how everyone personally feels about using nuclear material for space exploration? For the rovers heating elements it will be just a couple of grams but for generating electricity via a RTG a spacecraft would require several kilograms of radioactive material.

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/16921003...

SpaceForest was founded in 2011 and is developing an 11.5-metre suborbital rocket capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms to an altitude of 150 kilometres. The company conducted two initial PERUN test flights in 2023, but both suffered anomalies that forced mission aborts before the rockets reached the 50-kilometre target....

Launch window: Tuesday 9th of July from 21 - 24 CEST...

TLDR:...

I’m not sure how much astronaut training usually costs, so I don’t know if this is a good deal or not. Seems a bit strange that there is no flight plan at this point, though.

Recently, we got one of our best views yet of the tiny moon when a European mission named Hera, en route to the asteroid Didymos, flew through the Martian system for a gravity assist. During this transit, the spacecraft came within just 300 km of Deimos.

In a 28 February POLSA update, the agency confirmed that the information regarding the uncontrolled re-entry of the Falcon 9 second stage had been sent to the wrong email addresses at the Ministry of National Defence....