“Minky”-shines In the French Space Sector

Ariane chief seems frustrated with SpaceX for driving down launch costs Whoo-boy! An American summary of an English translation of a German interview of a French space launch manufacturing director. This seems like some comedy from the 1960’s, and only Clouseau is missing. I had to make sure this Ars Technica story was on the […]

May 18, 2018: Weekly Spatial Resolutions

The Mystery of the ‘SpaceBees’ Just Got Even Weirder We’ve talked about the SpaceBees issue a few times on our podcast, “The Mission Readiness Review.” In case you don’t know, Swarm Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup, launched some very small satellites for a few federal agencies on an Indian rocket early this year. But […]

On Time, On Target? The Rosetta Mission

The next few hours or so will be interesting and hopefully history-making. The European Space Agency (ESA) team has come so far with the Rosetta mission. If you don’t know what Rosetta is, in short: the Europeans have sent a spacecraft, Rosetta, to successfully intercept a comet over 400,000,000 km (about 250,000,000 miles) from Earth, and […]

DIY Space: Do You Have Room in Your Life for PocketSpacecraft?

“If at first you don’t succeed…”–this is the spirit that is guiding the people conducting the activities at PocketSpacecraft.com. They originally tried to get their “Mission to the Moon” project funded last year with Kickstarter, but didn’t get the funding level required there. The Mission to the Moon would’ve given lots of people the opportunity to send […]

Russia’s Fregat: What Mission Assurance?

Placing a satellite in the wrong orbit. It’s what the delightful world of mission assurance is supposed to prevent. If you talk to any space operator, mission assurance is the sexiest profession in the space realm…JK–not really! If anything, the typical space operator falls asleep at the first fishbone chart presented in the omnipresent and snore-inducing […]