Plus: New Long March rockets and India's launch cadence
| | | A SpaceNews daily newsletter | | 01/03/2025 | | | | | Eutelsat's OneWeb network was out of service for two days because of a software glitch. The outage began Tuesday, with service from the low Earth orbit constellation not fully restored until Thursday. A company spokesperson said the outage was caused by the failure of software in ground systems to recognize that 2024 was a leap year. OneWeb is currently available across the Americas and large parts of Europe and Asia, with plans to begin full services for government and enterprise customers worldwide in the spring. [SpaceNews]
Several new Chinese launch vehicles are scheduled to make their debut this year. Many of the rockets are intended to be reusable or can be adapted for reusability, while others are expendable but otherwise designed to be cost effective. Among the first of those new rockets scheduled to launch is the Long March 8A, expected to make its inaugural flight later this month. Many of the new rockets will be competing for contracts to deploy megaconstellations such as Thousand Sails and Guowang, or for commercial cargo missions to the Tiangong space station. [SpaceNews]
India is planning a record number of launches in 2025. The chairman of the Indian space agency ISRO, S. Somanath, said the company was planning 10 launches in 2025, a figure that would set a record for annual launches by the country. Those launches include the first uncrewed orbital test flight of the Gaganyaan crewed spacecraft as soon as March. Other key events include a launch of the joint NASA-ISRO NISAR radar mapping satellite and a commercial launch of a communications satellite for AST SpaceMobile. [SpaceNews]
The Space Force will hold meetings this month for an environmental study on increasing launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The service announced last month it would undertake an environmental impact study of modifications to Space Launch Complex (SLC) 6 at the California base to allow SpaceX to use the site for its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. The study will also examine increasing the overall Falcon launch rate at SLC-6 and SpaceX's existing SLC-4 to 100 missions per year. The increase in launches from Vandenberg faces opposition from some local residents and groups worried about environmental effects, including sonic booms. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | Blue Origin appears to be moving ahead with a launch of its New Glenn rocket as soon as the early morning hours Monday. Airspace notices are in effect for a launch of the first New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in a window that opens at 1 a.m. Eastern Monday, running until 4:45 a.m. Eastern. Jacklyn, the ship that serves as the landing platform for the New Glenn first stage, left Port Canaveral Thursday to take up position in the Atlantic. The company has not confirmed those launch plans or provided other details about the upcoming mission. [Florida Today]
NASA's Parker Solar Probe has returned more data confirming a successful close approach to the sun last month. The spacecraft started returning telemetry Wednesday from its passage within 6.1 million kilometers of sun on Christmas Eve. That telemetry, NASA said, showed that the spacecraft and its science instruments operated as expected during the flyby. Parker will start transmitting the science data it collected later this month as it moves away from the sun, allowing for higher data rates. [NASA]
China is starting to incorporate data from commercial satellites into its weather forecasting models. The China Meteorological Administration said it started this week to use data from the 23-satellite Tianmu-1 constellation and 12-satellite Yunyao-1 constellation. Both constellations provide radio occultation data, measuring Beidou and GPS navigation satellite signals that pass through the atmosphere. Several Western companies, such as GeoOptics, PlanetiQ and Spire, collect similar data, some of which is used by NOAA for weather forecasts. [Xinhua]
| | | | | | Megazoom
"Zooming in to a 10,000-kilometer region, from a distance of 200 million light years, is like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon."
– Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT, on observations that identified the exact source of a fast radio burst that took place 200 million light-years away. [MIT]
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