SPACEX DELIVERS FOR TELESAT WITH SUCCESSFUL EARLY MORNING LAUNCH - An upgraded model of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fired into orbit early Sunday from Florida’s Space Coast, hoisting a record-setting 7.8-ton (nearly 7.1-metric ton) communications satellite for Telesat toward its planned perch more than 22,000 miles over the equator. Riding a red-hot rocket plume from its nine Merlin 1D engines, the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket climbed away from Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad at 1:50 a.m. EDT (0550 GMT) Sunday. More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jul 23)
RECORD-SETTING COMMERCIAL SATELLITE AWAITS BLASTOFF FROM CAPE CANAVERAL - A huge U.S.-built, Canadian-owned communications satellite weighing 15,600 pounds, the heaviest spacecraft of its kind ever launched, is mounted to a Falcon 9 rocket for liftoff early Sunday from Cape Canaveral on a heavy-lifting mission that previously would have required SpaceX to throw away the launcher’s first stage booster. The Telstar 19 VANTAGE spacecraft is set to kick off a 15-year mission beaming broadband services across the Americas, and connecting airline passengers to WiFi over the North Atlantic Ocean. More (Source: SpaceFlight Now - Jul 22)
FACEBOOK CONFIRMS IT'S WORKING ON A NEW INTERNET SATELLITE - Fiber optic cables are the gold standard of a good internet connection, but laying them can be expensive, and in some parts of the world, a physically daunting task. So in remote corners of the globe, people often connect to the internet instead via massive geostationary satellites. These school bus-size instruments are especially far away, producing significantly slower connections. A host of companies believe the better way to connect the estimated half of Earth’s population that’s still offline is to launch “constellations” of smaller satellites into low Earth orbit, around 100 to 1,250 miles above our planet. More (Source: WIRED - Jul 21)
WATCH THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION POOP OUT A TINY SATELLITE THAT WILL SEARCH FOR MATTER - You might think of satellites as large, imposing spacecraft that cruise through Earth’s orbit like hulking beasts, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Many modern satellites are tiny in size, but they do lots of very important work, and the International Space Station just dropped another one above Australia. Its mission will be to find missing matter. The mini satellite is called a CubeSat because, well, it’s shaped like a box, and this particular CubeSat is going to peer into the Milky Way and study its halo. What’s a galaxy halo? Well, dear reader, I’m so glad you asked! More (Source: BGR - Jul 20)
BROWN UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADS LAUNCH THE LITTLE DIY SATELLITE THAT COULD - For Max Monn, and three fellow engineering students at Brown University, it all started as just another project in just another undergraduate class back in 2012. The assignment? "Developing a mission plan for a space related project," explained Monn. Keep in mind that developing the plan, in this class, was simply a theoretical learning exercise. As such, most students tend to opt for imaginative, pie-in-the sky type proposals like a new space station or a giant telescope. But inspired by a professor, who Monn calls "a self-described aerospace anarchist," Monn and his three friends wanted to "focus small." More (Source: wgbh.org - Jul 19)
CYGNUS SPACECRAFT LEAVES THE SPACE STATION AFTER GIVING IT AN ORBITAL BOOST - A Cygnus cargo spacecraft left the International Space Station (ISS) today (July 15), nearly two months after it arrived with supplies and science gear for the station's six-person crew. The uncrewed Cygnus OA-9 spacecraft, also known as the "S.S. J.R. Thompson," departed the ISS at 8:37 a.m. EDT (1237 GMT), when European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor set it free using Canadarm2, a 58-foot (18 meters) robotic arm that the astronauts controlled from inside the ISS. More (Source: Space.com - Jul 18)
MU SPACE TO LAUNCH NEW LEO SATELLITE - Mu Space plans to launch a new satellite into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in a significant strategic move. The company will collaborate with SSL, a Maxar Technologies company and provider of satellites and spacecraft systems, to develop concepts for communications and Earth observation satellites. SSL will help Mu Space with its plans to launch a satellite into LEO in the early 2020s. More (Source: Via Satellite - Jul 18)
SATELLITE ROCKET LAUNCHES TO BLAST OFF FROM UK AS PART OF PIONEERING SPACE PLAN - Satellite launches are set to come to the UK as Virgin hopes to carry a rocket on a plane and then launch it into space. The government hopes that the new launch plans are part of a vast new space industry across the country, which also includes launchpads in Scotland. Britain hasn't launched a satellite using a UK rocket since 1971, when Black Arrow carried a satellite called Prospero into low Earth orbit. Even that took off from a launchpad in Australia. More (Source: The Independent - Jul 17)
CYGNUS CARGO SHIP RELEASED FROM SPACE STATION, HEADS FOR EXTENDED MISSION - Closing out 52 days at the International Space Station, an automated Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo craft left the research outpost Sunday to climb into a higher orbit for deployment of six CubeSats and further engineering experiments, before de-orbiting over Pacific Ocean later this month. European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, at the controls of the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm, sent the command to release the Cygnus spacecraft a few hours after the supply ship was removed from a berthing port on the station’s Harmony module. More (Source: SoaceFlight Now - Jul 16)
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