Plus: Artemis 2 clears wet dress rehearsal
| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, NASA released a report into the 2024 crewed Starliner flight calling it a "Type A" mishap, Artemis 2 completed its wet dress rehearsal, Japan's ispace warned of delays in future moon landings and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust
NASA has classified the flawed Starliner crewed test flight in 2024 as its most serious level of mishap, with the agency's leadership citing shortfalls in how officials oversaw the program.
NASA released Feb. 19 an independent report into the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crew Flight Test mission, which suffered thruster failures during the spacecraft's approach to the International Space Station. The incident led NASA to return the spacecraft uncrewed, with the two astronauts who launched on Starliner remaining on the ISS for more than eight months before coming home on a Crew Dragon.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | NASA completed a second wet dress rehearsal for the Artemis 2 mission on Feb. 19 without any of the hydrogen leaks seen in the first such test earlier this month. During the test, NASA loaded the Space Launch System core and upper stages with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, then conducted a practice countdown.
Asked about cooperation with Roscosmos during a news conference after the Crew-12 launch to the International Space Station on Feb. 13, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he plans to attend the next crewed Soyuz launch to the station, scheduled for this summer from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A Falcon 9 launched a new crew to the International Space Station Feb. 13 to start a busy schedule of arriving and departing vehicles at the station. Crew-12 is commanded by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir with fellow NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway as pilot. European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are mission specialists.
| | MILITARY
| | In a departure from how military space programs are traditionally acquired, the Pentagon is seeking proposals under which companies would build and initially operate satellites to monitor geosynchronous orbit — and then transfer those systems to government control within 36 months.
Boeing opened a new production facility at its El Segundo, California, campus to manufacture electro-optical infrared, or EO/IR, sensors for U.S. military satellites, expanding capacity as demand grows for missile-tracking systems, the company said Feb. 20.
Procurements of certain elements of the U.S. military's low Earth orbit satellite constellation known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture are on hold as the Pentagon reviews acquisition options and shifts responsibility for parts of the program outside the Space Development Agency. | | | | | | | COMMERCIAL
| | In an earnings call discussing its fiscal third-quarter financial results this month, ispace executives said issues with development of the new VoidRunner engine could delay the company's next lander mission.
Space Epoch, full name Beijing Jianyuan Technology Co., Ltd., also sometimes referred to as Sepoch, announced a Series B financing round of an undisclosed amount Feb. 12, stating that the round involved participation from several leading market-oriented institutions, without identifying its backers.
Speaking at last week's SmallSat Symposium, Marco Brancati, a senior vice president in Leonardo's space division, discussed the Leonardo EO Constellation, a system of about 20 satellites with high-resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar payloads.
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