threelonmusketeers

FYI, [email protected] has more activity.

It might be worth considering consolidating the two communities.

B1067 will become the first booster to launch for the 26th time.

Starlink Group 12-14 launch out of SLC-40 in Florida is currently scheduled for 2025-02-21 15:19 UTC, or 2025-02-21 10:19 local time (EST). Booster 1076-21 to land on A Shortfall of Gravitas.

• SpaceX mission page
• NextSpaceflight page

Webcasts:

• Space Affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyY_Qmemo0Y
• Spaceflight Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilYBPUZCnjw
• NASASpaceflight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meWhAAe3lf4
• The Launch Pad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK7BshpDkeg
• SpaceX:
• The Space Devs:

The Tianwen-2 spacecraft arrived at Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province, southwest China, Feb. 20, according to a statement from the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

CNSA stated vaguely that the launch is scheduled to be carried out in the first half of this year. The mission was previously stated by officials to launch around May 2025 on a Long March 3B rocket.

Tianwen-2 will first target near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), considered a quasi-satellite of Earth due to its co-orbital dynamics. It aims to collect samples from the roughly 40 to 100-meter-diameter asteroid and deliver them to Earth around 2027. Kamoʻoalewa is possibly a chunk of the moon blasted into space following an impact event, according to researchers.

The main spacecraft will then head for main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS, which has asteroid-like orbital characteristics but also features comet-like activity.

The German aerospace agency DLR has signed on to be an anchor customer for The Exploration Company’s microgravity research service aboard its Nyx spacecraft.

Nyx is a modular, reusable space capsule that will initially be used to transport cargo to and from low Earth orbit and to host in-orbit experiments. In May 2024, The Exploration Company was selected by the European Space Agency as one of two companies working toward a demonstration mission to deliver cargo to the International Space Station in 2028. The other company selected was Thales Alenia Space.

On 20 February, during its DLR TecDays in Bonn, the German aerospace agency announced that it had signed a contract with The Exploration Company and would serve as an anchor customer for its microgravity research service. The contract secures space for 160 kilograms of scientific payloads aboard the inaugural flight of the Nyx Earth capsule in 2028.

In a statement late Feb. 19, NASA announced that Associate Administrator Jim Free will retire from the agency, effective Feb. 22. Free had been associate administrator, the top civil-service position in the agency, since the retirement of Bob Cabana at the end of 2023.

Free was previously associate administrator for exploration systems development, a position NASA created in 2021 when it split the former Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate into two directorates, one overseeing exploration programs and the other the International Space Station and related operations. Earlier in his 30-year NASA career, he was director of the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

ABL Space, once an emerging contender in the commercial launch industry, is rebranding as Long Wall as it pivots away from launching small satellites to focus on defense applications, including missile defense and hypersonic flight testing.

The company, founded in 2017 in El Segundo, California, initially sought to disrupt the small satellite launch market with its RS1 rocket, a low-cost, rapidly deployable vehicle designed to be transported in standard shipping containers. However, the venture struggled to gain traction, suffering two failed orbital launch attempts in 2023 and 2024. Facing stiff competition from established players like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, as well as financial challenges, ABL ultimately decided to shift gears.

On Feb. 19, founder and CEO Dan Piemont announced in a company blog post that ABL would rebrand as Long Wall, a name inspired by the defensive structures built by ancient Athens to protect against sieges. The company’s focus is developing containerized missile defense systems and target rockets for U.S. military applications.

Context

To understand why the odds from NASA are changing and whether we should be concerned about 2024 YR4, Ars connected with Robin George Andrews, author of the recently published book How to Kill an Asteroid. Good timing with the publication date, eh?

Ars: Why are the impact odds increasing?

Robin George Andrews: The asteroid’s orbit is not known to a great deal of precision right now, as we only have a limited number of telescopic observations of it. However, even as the rock zips farther away from Earth, certain telescopes are still managing to spy it and extend our knowledge of the asteroid’s orbital arc around the Sun. The odds have fluctuated in both directions over the last few weeks, but overall, they have risen; that’s because the amount of uncertainty astronomers have as to its true orbit has shrunk, but Earth has yet to completely fall out of that zone of uncertainty. As a proportion of the remaining uncertainty, Earth is taking up more space, so for now, its odds are rising.

Think of it like a beam of light coming out of the front of that asteroid. That beam of light shrinks as we get to know its orbit better, but if Earth is yet to fall out of that beam, it takes up proportionally more space. So, for a while, the asteroid’s impact odds rise. It’s very likely that, with sufficient observations, Earth will fall out of that shrinking beam of light eventually, and the impact odds will suddenly fall to zero.