T+257: Chandrayaan-3, Luna-25, and the Deep Space Network (with Scott Tilley)
Scott Tilley joins me to talk about ISRO’s success with Chandrayaan-3, Roscosmos’ Luna-25 mission and the mystery behind it, and the state of the Deep Space Network.
Scott Tilley joins me to talk about ISRO’s success with Chandrayaan-3, Roscosmos’ Luna-25 mission and the mystery behind it, and the state of the Deep Space Network.
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.
This is great news for cash-hungry SpaceX as they roll out Starlink. It’ll help subsidize the antenna cost that SpaceX is reportedly losing quite a bit of money on per unit.
Dr. Marco Langbroek has been tracking USA 310, the satellite deployed on the NROL-101 launch, and it turns out it went to an 11,000 kilometer orbit at 58° inclination.
It was never a question that Spaceflight would be interested in the SpaceX rideshare program. It’s a perfect match—inexpensive slots offered by SpaceX which can be taken advantage of to sell the end-to-end services offered by Spaceflight at a solid margin. They’re also manifesting two BlackSky satellites on the next Starlink flight, just like we saw a few days ago with Planet flying SkySats on the previous flight.
I’m hopeful—both personally and for his sake—that Gerst is heading to SpaceX not to be a political face for the organization or to schmooze inside the right DC circles, but rather to take things back to his roots as an engineer.
A tale of politics, protests, and contracts tells the story of how SpaceX is in transition—and maybe has already transitioned—from a scrappy upstart to an established launch provider.
This is obviously a bad look for NASA, Boeing, SpaceX, and Congress, but it’s smart to have Soyuz overlap with the early Commercial Crew flights, just in case. However, let’s not forget the constant fearmongering from Bill Gerstenmaier and other NASA officials about how it’s too late to buy more Soyuz seats.
This shit is as annoying as when the Alabama Space Mafia does the same sort of thing.
Jake Robins of WeMartians joins me to talk InSight, Mars EDL, and Mars 2020.