The Space Roundup - Dec 12th, 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!

Launches everywhere! 

What an amazing week full of successful rocket launches! 

Rocket Lab launched another pair of BlackSky satellites as its final launch of the year, with the promise of launching way more rockets next year.

China reached a very important launch milestone this week: its 49th launch in 2021 and the 400th (yeah, you read it right!) launch of the Long March rocket family. What a milestone!

Commercial space 

We have also witnessed some updates related to commercial activity in space this week. Blue Origin launched its third crewed mission carrying six people to the edge of space.

And a Soyuz rocket took two Japanese private astronauts to the ISS. One of them is Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire that founded SpaceX’s Dear Moon mission, so this is kind of a training mission to him before going to the Moon.

Roscosmos also announced it has selected the first cosmonaut to fly to the ISS onboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission next year. It’s going to be a woman: Anna Kikina. In exchange, a NASA astronaut will fly onboard a Soyuz rocket. So nice to see this kind of friendly exchange between both nations.

Silent Martian Helicopter 

After its last flight, our loved helicopter Ingenuity is now out of reach of the Perseverance rover’s radio antenna. This means we just know it’s ok, but the broken transmissions won’t let it send data back and therefore it can’t plan another flight until the rover drives back to it or it blindly flights vertically to restore communications (in a possibly suicidal mission?). Oh, no! Let’s see what the team decides about it. Crossing fingers! 

Cool astronomy!

Some interesting studies this week! A group of astronomers found a galaxy with no dark matter. Weird. Dark matter is supposed to be the reason why galaxies and galaxy clusters do not fly apart, but now apparently there’s a galaxy about 250 million light-years away that has none of this material, so this