Plus: More uncertainty for Starliner
By Dan Robitzski
Commentators often subject space missions to cheap science fiction comparisons. But if all goes well, a mission will launch this weekend that would actually have a chance at surviving a Hollywood pitch meeting.
On June 27, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket is scheduled to launch Link, a spacecraft built by Katalyst Space Technologies. Once in low Earth orbit, Link will attempt to grapple NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space telescope launched in 2004, and boost its orbit. Without intervention, the observatory will be destroyed as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere in October. Swift’s mission is risky, and Katalyst was tasked with developing and launching the spacecraft on a quick, urgent timeline.
“When we set out, one of the very few requirements from the NASA team was, you must launch before it’s too late, and we have been able to meet that readiness timeline,” Kieran Wilson, principal investigator for Link at Katalyst, said at a June 17 missing briefing.
Suspense aside, the mission may accomplish a critical milestone that would open the doors to an entirely new category of in-space servicing: boosting the orbit of a legacy spacecraft that was not designed to be serviced or grappled. Traditionally, spacecraft maneuverability has depended on a couple of yes or no questions: whether a given satellite has its own propulsion to avoid collisions and restore its orbit, whether it’s built to interface with a booster spacecraft and whether it’s cost effective to keep the mission going. If the Swift mission succeeds, it introduces new shades of gray.
And already, the conversation is shifting in a few interesting ways. Inspired by the Swift mission, NASA is already looking into the next observatory booster. The agency said it’s open to reboosting the Hubble Space Telescope, provided it can find a cost effective way to do so — and a cost-effective way to keep Hubble operational.
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SIGNIFICANT DIGIT
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17 hours |
The amount of time that passed between the Space Force issuing a formal launch order and Rocket Lab launching an Electron to begin the Victus Haze Puma military exercise. |
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UNCERTAINTY FOR STARLINER
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Despite progress in solving the issues with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, NASA safety advisers said it could be as long as a year before the spacecraft takes off in another mission. Even that seems to be a rough estimate. Members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, said at a June 22 meeting that there is no clear timetable for flying the vehicle on an uncrewed test flight, called Starliner-1. Though NASA said in November that Starliner could launch as soon as this April, that optimism may be premature. While many of the technical issues facing the spacecraft have been addressed, some issues that caused safety concerns during the crewed Starliner flight in June 2024 remain unresolved. While Boeing said it’s committed to returning to crewed missions, NASA has also been preparing contingency plans in case Starliner is never cleared for launch. |
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The White House has issued an executive order aiming to unify and accelerate U.S. development of quantum technologies, including space systems that could enable next-generation navigation, sensing and secure communications.
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Ubotica Technologies, an Irish company focused on artificial intelligence for spacecraft, has raised $11 million to expand commercial sales of its maritime-intelligence platform.
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