Main Engine Cut OffJared Isaacman, commander of Inspiration4, announced the Polaris Program—a privately-funded development program to “rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities” via flights on SpaceX’s Dragon and Starship vehicles. It begins with a mission to the highest Earth orbit ever flown by humans, featuring the first commercial spacewalk, and culminates with the first crewed Starship flight.
I’ve long been a fan of Nanoracks, and this is huge news for them. They have a particular kind of grit that I love to see in a company, and that pairs really well with a long-term-focused crew like Voyager. Let’s see how they can put the new investment to work.
I took a ride out to AGI a year ago and got to see what was going on inside Comspoc. I like what they have going on there, and spinning off to their own entity will clean up the communications around what they offer and why it matters. I’m excited about this.
These kinds of acquisitions seem to me to come with two truths: they’re always way less about space than we like to think, and they always change less than we like to imagine.
All in all this seems like the right call. At a certain point, the risk of bigger delays coming from the process of fixing this issue is more than the risk on this particular flight. We have yet to see political support of Orion and SLS be eroded in any meaningful way, but every increasing delay has to catch up at some point.
I mentioned some of this in a recent podcast episode, but considering how long it will take to get BE-4 production up to the point of supporting multiple Vulcan flights alongside the first New Glenn flights, and considering that we have heard little to nothing on the BE-3U front in quite a while, it sure seems like we’re still at least 2 years out from New Glenn’s first flight.
Starship SN8 took flight last week on a mostly-successful mission to test its final descent phase. I share some thoughts on the test, the state of Starship development, and what that all means for the near future of Starship.
I’m still not quite sure what to make of Chinese private space companies these days, but news like this makes the recent revisions to US commercial remote sensing regulations make so much sense.
These three launch providers will be of great interest to NASA if and when they get flying regularly. NASA would like to not only help provide payloads and incentive to get them flying, but to also have a foot in the door early to start understanding their work, their capabilities, and maybe a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes at these companies. Relatedly, I’m slightly concerned about what they’ll find at Firefly, because something seems to be up there.
Yesterday’s flight of Starship SN8 has to be one of the most interesting, exciting, and downright spectacular flight tests of my lifetime. In a dim year, it certainly brightens your day to watch, even if it does not bring you optimism for the future. And there are some truly meaningful takeaways from the flight.