Plus: China sets launch record despite rocket failure, Parker Solar Probe sets sun record
| | | A SpaceNews daily newsletter | | 12/27/2024 | | | | | A Chinese commercial rocket failed to reach orbit during a launch Thursday. The Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1) rocket lifted off at 8:03 p.m. Eastern from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. CAS Space, the launch operator, said several hours later that the rocket's third stage lost attitude control seconds after ignition, triggering its self-destruct system. The rocket's payload was an undisclosed number of satellites that included a French cubesat to study the South Atlantic Anomaly and a 300-kilogram cargo spacecraft from Chinese commercial space firm AZSpace carrying science payloads. The failure was the first in six flights of the solid-fuel Kinetica-1. The launch was China's 68th launch attempt of 2024, surpassing the national record of 67 launches in a calendar year, set in 2023. [SpaceNews]
Landspace, another Chinese launch company, has raised more than $100 million to work on reusable rockets. Landspace received 900 million yuan ($123 million) from China's National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading Fund, according to Chinese media reports Wednesday. The company stated that the funds will primarily be used for the development, testing and production of its Zhuque reusable methane-liquid oxygen launch vehicles. That includes the Zhuque-3, a Falcon 9-class rocket expected to make its first launch next year followed by recovery and reuse of the first stage in 2026. [SpaceNews]
True Anomaly has successfully tested the spacecraft flying its second mission after a failure on the first mission. The company said its Jackal spacecraft, launched on SpaceX's Bandwagon-2 rideshare mission last week, made contact with the ground after deployment and responded to commands from the ground. The first two Jackal spacecraft, launched in March, lost contact with controllers shortly after deployment. True Anomaly said it incorporated lessons learned from the first mission into the second as it tests capabilities needed for future military space operations such as space domain awareness. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | NASA's Parker Solar Probe phoned home after making a record-setting approach to the sun. NASA said late Thursday that it received a "beacon" signal confirming that the spacecraft was operating normally after coming within about 6.1 million kilometers of the sun Tuesday morning. That flyby is the closest by any spacecraft to the sun. NASA said the spacecraft will start returning telemetry next week, followed by science data. Project officials noted earlier this month that the spacecraft, including its thermal protection system, was working better than expected since its launch in 2018. [NASA]
Iceye has raised an additional $65 million to fund its work on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. The company announced last week it raised the money as an extension of a $93 million Series E round in April. Several investors, including Solidium Oy, the Finnish sovereign wealth fund that led the April round, participated in this extension. The Helsinki-based company has now raised just over $500 million and has launched more than 40 SAR imaging satellites to date, nine of them this year. [SpaceNews]
Taking OneWeb out of bankruptcy has turned out to be a bad financial investment for the United Kingdom. The U.K. government partnered with Bharti Global in 2020 to acquire the satellite operator after it filed for bankruptcy protection, with the government investing $500 million. Eutelsat later acquired OneWeb in an all-stock deal. The value of the U.K. government's stake in Eutelsat OneWeb is now just one-fourth of its original value as shares in Eutelsat have fallen sharply in the last year. The current Labour government in the U.K. noted the OneWeb bailout took place under an earlier Conservative government and that it was working "to ensure this investment provides value to U.K. taxpayers in the long term." [The Telegraph]
| | | | | | Lunar Ring
"Came here from the moon just so we can crush it up and put it into this customer's ring."
– Haydn Coats, manufacturing lead at Honest Hands Ring Co., on making a wedding band for a customer that included material from a lunar meteorite as well as a strip of tape flown to the moon and back on Apollo 11. [collectSPACE]
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