Time marches on, I hope everyone is coping well with our
social distancing.
Good news for SpaceX, NASA still talks about the first
commercial crew Dragon launching in the second half of May. They even announced
the crew of 4 for the next mission, 2 SpaceX astronauts, a lady astronaut from
NASA and a Japanese astronaut. NASA also announced that the NASA “worm” logo
will be on the Falcon 9 rocket but the astronauts will wear the “meatball” logo
on the spacesuits. I hope the lack of logo consistency doesn’t cause the
mission any problems. I remember when the use of metric and English units
caused a Mars mission to fail.
SpaceX was also selected as the first company to do cargo
supply missions to the Lunar Gateway. Their craft will be called the Dragon XL
and use a Falcon Heavy rocket to get 5 metric tons (11,000 lbs) to lunar orbit.
On a sad note, Bigelow Aerospace which sent the BEAM
inflatable module to the ISS in 2016, laid off its entire workforce. The fact
that Axion Aerospace got the contract for a commercial module on the ISS might
be the biggest reason for their demise. I had high hopes for Bigelow building
the first orbiting hotel around Earth.
The European company, OneWeb, declared bankruptcy. OneWeb
was the closest competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink, “internet from space” program.
They already had 74 satellites in orbit. SpaceX has 360 satellites in orbit and
launching 60 of them at a time. Maybe investors think no one can compete with
SpaceX’s price point for launching things into orbit.
The helicopter for the Perseverance rover made its last
blade spinning test before being packed away for launch on July 17. It’s never
too early to start eating those lucky JPL peanuts to insure a successful
mission.
Russia is scheduled to launch a crew of 3 to the ISS on
April 9th. Chris Cassidy is the only American on the mission and
after 8 days he will be the only American astronaut on the ISS for 6 months
unless SpaceX gets its crew of 2 up there using Crew Dragon.
Take care all, Ad Astra, Jim
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