A number of exciting events involving
New Space entrepreneurial space development
took place in the past couple of months.
Here is a sample of three of them:
On December 3rd, SpaceX
for the first time launched
a commercial telecommunications satellite
towards geostationary
orbit. For the flight of the SES-8
satellite, they used the greatly upgraded
Falcon
9 v1.1 rocket, which had its first flight
on September 29th from a new pad at Vandenberg
AFB in southern California (see
launch). Here is a video of this latestlaunch,
which took place from Cape Canveral, Florida:
..
On September 18th, Orbital
Sciences launched its new Antares rocket
with the Cygnus cargo module on a mission
to demonstrate that the Cygnus can deliver
cargo to the International Space Station.
On September 29th (by coincidence the same
day as the first Falcon 9 v1.1 flight),
the Cygnus successfully
berthed to the ISS. The Cygnus cargo
was unloaded over the following few weeks
and loaded with waste. The Cygnus departed
from the ISS on
October 23 and the next day entered
the atmosphere and burned up over the ocean.
Here is a video of the launch of the Antares:
..
See also the
video of the approach and berthing of
the Cygnus with the ISS. The first operational
Cygnus cargo delivery is scheduled to launch
on December 17th.
Cubesats
are spacecraft just 10cm x 10cm x 10cm in
volume that have become very popular as
student projects, as technology testbeds
and for science experiments. In addition
to being released from a rocket, a new low
cost way to put a cubesat into orbit is
to have it delivered to the station on a
cargo vehicle like the Cygnus and arrange
with the company NanoRacks
to shoot it into orbit from the station.
On November 19th, three cubesats (including
two from the company NanoSatisfi)
were put into orbit this way:
..
Dozens of cubesats will be launched from
the ISS in the coming months. This will
include 28 earth observation satellites
from the company Planet
Labs.
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