Welcome back to Spaceflight Insight: your weekly dose of digestible space news.
Our first piece of space news is a good sign for the Artemis program. On May 19th, NASA announced that Blue Origin, an aerospace company owned by Jeff Bezos, will create a second lander for the Artemis program. This second lander will first be used on the Artemis V mission.
In April of 2021 NASA selected SpaceX to build a lunar lander variant of their Starship vehicle. These “Lunar Starships” will be used for the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. Blue Origin originally bid for a lander in the first round of contracts to develop a lander for the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. NASA determined that their bid was too expensive and underperformed compared to the SpaceX design. When the second round of contracts were announced, Blue Origin submitted a revised design that met NASA’s requirements. In future Artemis missions both the Blue Origin and SpaceX landers will be used.
In our next piece of news we look at the upcoming collapse of the small satellite launch market. Recently the small satellite launch market has become saturated with many new companies promising to lower the price of launching small satellites into orbit. Due to this many companies are going through hardship. After 3 launch failures, Virgin Orbit, the small satellite branch of Virgin Galactic, has filed for bankruptcy. Although the company has been disbanded, some of the assets that Virgin Galactic used will have a second chance with other aerospace companies. Stratolaunch, a company that plans to airdrop hypersonic test vehicles, acquired Virgin Orbit’s modified 747 aircraft.
The aircraft was used to air launch Virgin Orbit’s horizontally launched rockets. Under its new ownership, the 747 will be used to launch hypersonic vehicles that require an air launch. In another purchase, Rocket Lab bought Virgin Orbit’s fabrication facility, only a short walk from their current Long Beach production facility. It is believed that Rocket Lab will use this new facility in the production of its next generation Neutron Rocket.
Finally in space news we go to Cape Canaveral. On May 21st the Axiom 2 mission launched on a Falcon 9 rocket going to the International Space Station.
The Axiom 2 mission is the second mission bought by Axiom. Axiom is a private space station company with the goal of creating a private space station in low Earth orbit. On these missions Axiom has been training their own astronauts to become more prepared when Axiom launches their own station.
I hope to make these digestible bits of spaceflight news better, so If you have any aerospace questions or some feedback, don’t hesitate to let me know. Contact me at codyeutsler@gmail.com.
As always, fly safe.
