The Space Roundup - Dec 5th, 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!

Commercial progress

NASA has awarded Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman around $415M to develop three commercial space station concepts and has also awarded SpaceX three more commercial crew flights now that Boeing’s Starliner is delayed. 

SpaceX, with its 27th Falcon 9 mission of the year broke last years’ record of 26 successful launches… how amazing is this? Reusability and a super-fast turnaround is making possible a launch cadence that was impossible to imagine just a couple of years ago.

But it’s not all good news to SpaceX. This very week, Elon Musk sent an email to all employees stating that there’s a potential risk of bankruptcy if they don’t increase production of Raptor engines to power Starships. This is the only way they can be sustainable if they want to keep up with the pace of satellites and payload they need to put into orbit to make their plans come true. Crossing fingers. 

Space Innovation

The Indian company Skyroot successfully test-fired this week the first privately developed cryogenic rocket engine in India. They are 3D-printing a superalloy, reducing production time by 95%. Just Wow.

This week Rocket Lab shared the design of its next rocket: Neutron. The design is truly amazing and very innovative and if you hadn’t had the chance to watch the presentation video, I totally recommend it: jaw-dropping. 

At the ISS, the heroic crew successfully replaced an antenna on an EVA after the debris nightmares of last week.

Oh, and the space mystery of the week is a Moon mystery. The Chinese Yutu-2 rover has found a estrange cubic object they have named “mystery house” and they are planning to go visit it soon… what could it be?? Look at the pic below

Andrew Jones @AJ_FI

Ah. We have an update from Yutu-2 on the lunar far side, including an image of a cubic shape on the northern horizon ~80m away from the rover in Von Kármán crater.