The Space Roundup - Dec 26th, 2021

Hello, hello, my dear space lovers! Merry Christmas to you all!

Welcome to the last Roundup of the year 2021… and what a roundup! Hold tight!

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

JWST Made it!

What else can we start with today? Yes! The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched from French Guiana and flawlessly got to space on board an Ariane 5 rocket.

After decades of work, the fact that the telescope is safe in space, with a solar panel feeding it and with proper communications with ground control is already an amazing feat.

What’s next? This was just the first milestone! During the next fifteen to thirty days, it is going to completely deploy all its components (solar panels, heat shields, and the telescope’s mirrors) while continuing its trip to its destination at Lagrange Point L2. This is a very scary engineering challenge (some are already calling it “the 30 days of terror”). Then, it will take about six months to begin its scientific operations there and we’ll be impatiently waiting for the first results back. Amazing. Go, JWST!!!

SpaceX updates

SpaceX hit another historical milestone this week: the successful 100th landing of a Falcon9 booster. It is amazing to see that what was impossible just a bunch of years ago is now business as usual, and SpaceX makes it look easy after so many launches (although it obviously isn’t!).

This milestone was reached during last week’s successful cargo mission to the ISS.

Back on BocaChica, the Starship team began testing the first flightworthy Super Heavy Booster.

And sadly, one of the payloads of their next rideshare mission had to get off the mission: SpaceFlight’s Sherpa Tug started leaking propellant after integrating it and now it can’t fly until engineers find out the reason. Ouch.

Roscosmos’ Christmas abort

Russia had planned a launch on December 24th, but it automatically aborted. It was going to be the third and final Angara A5 demonstration mission, but a ground system malfunction stopped it. Another ouch.

Supermassive black hole

Last week, a team of astronomers published a