We are cutting through the orbital debris for you. In other words, we’re keeping an eye on space news on the web so you don’t have to.
Here is our round-up of the most important, and interesting, space news stories of September (space orders can be found in another post):
Orbital arrivals and landings
- While most re-entries are uncontrolled decays, ESA wanted to do it right by Cluster 2 Salsa which had a controlled deorbit in the South Pacific
- Chang’e 6 is confirmed as ‘halo’ orbiting Sun-Earth Lagrange L2 point in extra mission
- China’s reusable spaceplane lands at last after 267 day mission (note Seradata calls this mission CSSHQ 1 (FLIGHT 3))
Things going wrong…and getting fixed
- New Glenn maiden flight delays cause NASA’S ESCAPADE Mars mission to jump ship
- Low power issue and hence lower electric thrust results in slower trajectory for BepiColombo Mercury mission
- Mysterious sounds on Starliner traced to speaker feedback
- NASA notes partial repair to Russian module air leak on ISS
- Ariane 6 upper stage ignition failure to be fixed on future flights via a software workaround
- Bad news for NASA Europa Clipper mission as transistors aboard found to be non-radiation proof
- Rocket Lab Electron KS launch prevented by last second abort after ignition
Space companies and money
Industry news
- Wanting access to US government business Europe’s Aerospacelab opens its US satellite manufacturing plant
- Xona opens office in Canada ahead of its GPS back-up satellite constellation plan
- OHB’s plan to privatise via KKR deal gets regulatory approval
- FAA fines SpaceX for launch licence violations…then SpaceX fires back
- NASA signs US$4.82 billion potential value deal with Intuitive Machines for lunar communications relay and navigation services
- We all want space sustainability debris-wise, and NASA is formalising a division to work on it
Launchpads
- Ex-Soyuz Sinnamary launch pads in French Guiana to be used by ArianeGroup-backed MaiaSpace
- French launch start-up Sirius to fly from Arnhem, Australia
Fundraising
- China’s Sustain Space gets funding for debris removal (and presumably satellite removal) experiments
- i-Space China gets US$99 million funding to develop Hyperbola-3 part reusable rocket
- On a larger scale, Telesat gets US$1.9 billion in Canadian government funds for Lightspeed LEO comsat constellation
- Satellite deployment firm D-Orbit raises US$166 million in Series C funding
