Astronomy Prints 🌌: Second launch of Japan's H3 rocket planned for February

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A SpaceNews daily newsletter | Thursday, December 28, 2023

Top Stories

Japan has set a mid-February launch date for the second flight of its H3 rocket. The Japanese space agency JAXA said Wednesday that the launch is slated for no earlier than Feb. 14, carrying a test payload and two smallsat secondary payloads. The launch is scheduled for nearly a year after the first flight of the H3, which failed to place an Earth observation satellite into orbit when its second stage did not ignite. [SpaceNews]

Japanese Earth observation company Axelspace has raised nearly $44 million. The company raised the Series D round last week from a group of Japanese investors. Axelspace plans to use the funding to both expand its fleet of five Earth imaging satellites as well as develop a new line of business building and operating smallsats for other customers. [SpaceNews]

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says he sees two ways to undo the Biden administration's decision to place the headquarters of Space Command in Colorado. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said in an interview that he will first see if the Pentagon's inspector general finds any evidence that the White House "politically manipulated" the decision to keep Space Command's headquarters in Colorado Springs rather than move it to Huntsville, Alabama. If that approach fails, he said he expects Donald Trump, if elected next year, will undo that decision. The Trump administration selected Huntsville in its final weeks. [Politico]

Other News

A Chinese rocket launched a set of four weather satellites Wednesday just days after a similar launch. A Kuaizhou-1A rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 2:50 a.m. Eastern and placed four Tianmu-1 commercial weather satellites into orbit. Another Kuaizhou-1A launched four Tianmu-1 less than three days earlier. [Xinhua]

A Soyuz rocket launched a classified payload Wednesday. A Soyuz-2.1v rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome at 2:03 a.m. Eastern carrying a payload designated Cosmos 2574. No details about the spacecraft, placed into a sun-synchronous orbit, were disclosed. [RussianSpaceWeb.com]

NASA's Juno spacecraft will pass close to Jupiter's volcanic moon Io this weekend. Juno will pass just 1,500 kilograms from Io on Saturday, the closest approach by a spacecraft to that moon since the Galileo spacecraft in 2001. Scientists plan to use this flyby and another close flyby in February to study Io and its active volcanoes. [NASA/JPL]

Beyond the Sphere

"Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid."

– Bina Venkataraman, arguing that musical performances may provide "finally, a good reason to travel to space." [Washington Post]