The Space Roundup - Nov 21st, 2021

Hello, hello, my dear space lovers!
Are you ready for yet another week of space awesomeness?

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

New orbital success!

This week we have a new member of the orbital family: Astra made it! In their fourth attempt, they successfully made their rocket reach an astonishing height of 500 kilometers (100kms higher than the ISS, for your reference). Wow! Go, Astra!

Spanish Innovation

Yeah, a bit of national pride here :) The Spanish startup Pangea successfully tested this week the first MethaLox aerospike engine in the world. This type of engine can have a massive impact on the amount of propellant needed to take a payload to orbit (and therefore the price and weight). This can be truly revolutionary if applied to heavy rockets such as SpaceX’s and others. Imagine a 15% cost/propellant reduction on a reusable rocket that is already orders of magnitude cheaper compared to other players in the industry. Revolutionary!

SpaceX updates

Talking about SpaceX, this week Elon Musk has been sharing a lot of details on his plans. First, he feels pretty confident Starship will fly in January 2022. Then he wants to launch about a dozen Starships during the year, taking real payloads to orbit by 2023. After that, they’d need to focus on propellant transfer in orbit and then on going to the Moon for the Artemis missions they have been assigned. All this while also planning to use Starships as building blocks for a permanent human base on Mars (Mars Base Alpha) … wooooow. What an exciting vision they have!!!

Looking for habitable planets

Australian scientists have announced a new mission to search for close habitable planets near us. It is called TOLIMAN and will focus on the closest stars to identify exoplanets that might host life. Interesting!

Russians playing with fire

Yeah, the Russians have done something really dangerous this week: in order to test a new defense missile, they shot one of their satellites in orbit and destroyed it. The problem? It generated a debris cloud that caused a serious alarm