The Space Roundup - Jan 30th, 2022

Hello, hello, my dear space lover! Get ready for another week of space awesomeness!

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3, 2, 1, zero! Lift-off!

Blue Origin's space robots!

Blue Origin enters the space robotics market. Yes! Blue Origin has acquired Honeybee Robotics. This firm, active since 1983, is specialized in ISRU, drills, sample collection, and mining both on Earth and in space. Wow. This is a key element in the space exploration architecture and Blue Origin is betting hard moving forward with this acquisition. Extremely interesting!

I’d like to see how SpaceX reacts to this: will they acquire another similar competitor or will they just move forward on their own and create all the ISRU robots and infrastructure themselves? Amazing race… 

OrbitFab's on fire!

Talking about robots, OrbitFab is on fire! This week they’ve announced a partnership with Rogue Space to use their orbital robots for satellite inspections while equipping them with their refueling port to make them refuelable.  

Also this week, they have shared that they are working with Phase Four Plasma to make their Maxwell engines refuelable. This would mean their whole ecosystem of engines and satellites will soon be capable of using OrbitFab’s services and greatly extend the missions of their customers. Way to go, fam!     

Sponsor update

Hurry up! There’s a limited offer for pre-orders of the "Goodnight moon base” book before February 1st! It includes exclusive bonus perks from the author. Check it out!

Anomalies & issues

Astroscale has paused its debris-removal demo because of an anomaly. In this test, two satellites flying close to each other had to rendezvous and dock autonomously, but an anomaly made it be unsafe. The team is now looking into the data. We’ll keep an eye on the mission. Good luck, Astroscale!

Remember the anomaly that happened right after the launch of NASA’s Lucy mission? One of the two solar arrays failed to latch and now the cause of the problem has been identified. Next is to decide whether they retry or leave it as it is: it can operate just fine as it is right now, but might be dangerous when turning on the engines…fingers crossed!  

What else didn’t go as