The Space Roundup - Jan 16th, 2022

Get ready for another week of space awesomeness!

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

Gas stations in space

Orbit Fab, the company offering refueling services in space, has signed an contract with Astroscale to refuel its life-extension satellites in orbit. With this orbital refueling service, these amazing Astroscale satellites will be able to help many more satellites extend their missions by fixing, repositioning, accelerating or de-orbiting them (to eliminate space debris).

This is extremely interesting for the ever-growing orbital economy, as it definitely changes how missions are planned: no more fuel? Please, stop and refuel to continue with your mission. Awesome!  

Virgin Orbit success! 

Virgin Orbit successfully launched the LauncherOne rocket, carrying 11 satellites to a 500-kilometer orbit. Remember this rocket is launched from a Boing747 airplane (called Cosmic Girl). Apart from being a very important milestone for the company, which has recently gone public, it was carrying several very interesting experiments and tech demonstrations such as water thrusters for satellite propulsion in space and a new system to help cubesats dock with others magnetically (you can read more about some of these experimental sats here)

SpaceX rideshare mission

This is not the only successful launch of experiments and tests this week. SpaceX has launched a rideshare mission with more than 100 different satellites from big and small organizations, including multinationals, startups, universities… all kind of innovative ideas bringing progress to all of us and getting to space in a single rocket launch. This is one of the major impacts SpaceX’s having in the industry: bringing down launch costs to a mere $5000 per kilogram (almost any organization can afford that!) it’s truly opening more and more opportunities to inexpensively send experiments to space. I can’t imagine the impact this is going to have in the very close future of space exploration.

For the concrete booster used for this mission, it was its tenth launch and landing in 19 months. That is flying every 45 days! That is what makes it possible to be so affordable. Great.

New boy in town

Last week Astra, the new American launch vehicle company, announced that it's going to deploy its first