#new-space — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #new-space, aggregated by home.social.
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"German aerospace company signs 10-year deal to use N.S. space launch pad" by CBC🇨🇦 - Isar Aerospace plans to begin commercial orbital launches of small to medium satellites from Nova Scotia on Canada's Atlantic coast in 2028. (Europe doesn't have sites to launch east over water without population downrange.) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/german-aerospace-company-signs-10-year-deal-to-use-n-s-space-launch-pad-9.7261257 #NewSpace #Canada #business
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"German aerospace company signs 10-year deal to use N.S. space launch pad" by CBC🇨🇦 - Isar Aerospace plans to begin commercial orbital launches of small to medium satellites from Nova Scotia on Canada's Atlantic coast in 2028. (Europe doesn't have sites to launch east over water without population downrange.) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/german-aerospace-company-signs-10-year-deal-to-use-n-s-space-launch-pad-9.7261257 #NewSpace #Canada #business
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A combination of love letter and marching orders from the Universe to the reader, channeled through Rick Tumlinson. I loved it. ONWARD.
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Isar Aerospace had to abort the launch of the Spectrum 2 rocket once again. A new launch attempt could be on the horizon in July 2026.
#IsarAerospace #Spectrum #Spectrum2 #Europe #NewSpace #Space -
"With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit" by @arstechnica / Stephen Clark - #SpaceX #Falcon9 launch today had a surprise experimental payload called "Starfall", announced just before launch to be a re-entry pod for #cargo delivery on suborbital flight or re-entry from orbit, landing by parachute wherever a probably-military cargo needs to go. Most details so far are from a public environmental statement for FAA. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/with-starfall-spacex-eyes-an-edge-in-global-cargo-delivery-from-orbit/ #NewSpace #space #business
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"With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit" by @arstechnica / Stephen Clark - #SpaceX #Falcon9 launch today had a surprise experimental payload called "Starfall", announced just before launch to be a re-entry pod for #cargo delivery on suborbital flight or re-entry from orbit, landing by parachute wherever a probably-military cargo needs to go. Most details so far are from a public environmental statement for FAA. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/with-starfall-spacex-eyes-an-edge-in-global-cargo-delivery-from-orbit/ #NewSpace #space #business
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As space startups prepare to launch the first commercial AI data centers into Low Earth Orbit, the final frontier isn't engineering; it's risk management. Discussions are officially underway with global insurers to create a brand-new asset class for orbital silicon.
#spacetech #artificialintelligence #innovations #spacestartups #techinsurance #fintech #deeptech #datacenters #newspace #spacex
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As space startups prepare to launch the first commercial AI data centers into Low Earth Orbit, the final frontier isn't engineering; it's risk management. Discussions are officially underway with global insurers to create a brand-new asset class for orbital silicon.
#spacetech #artificialintelligence #innovations #spacestartups #techinsurance #fintech #deeptech #datacenters #newspace #spacex
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This article does a good job covering my concerns with space based data centers:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
Thermodynamics is a huge problem, losing two of three ways to shed heat is a real challenge. Adding a large per pound fixed cost to each component is show stopper I would think. Their calculation assumes $44/kg when the current rate is really like $5000/kg.
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This article does a good job covering my concerns with space based data centers:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
Thermodynamics is a huge problem, losing two of three ways to shed heat is a real challenge. Adding a large per pound fixed cost to each component is show stopper I would think. Their calculation assumes $44/kg when the current rate is really like $5000/kg.
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I knew the UP Aerospace team because it started as a commercial development of the Civilian Space eXploration Team CSXT amateur rocket. When the CSXT Space Shot 2004 became the first successful amateur rocket to space (after many attempts), I led the Stratofox tracking team that recovered the rocket from deep in the mountains of Nevada's Black Rock desert. When Jerry started UP Aerospace, it gave us all a hint he likes borrowing acronyms from railroads. 😀 #NewSpace #rocketry #space #business
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I knew the UP Aerospace team because it started as a commercial development of the Civilian Space eXploration Team CSXT amateur rocket. When the CSXT Space Shot 2004 became the first successful amateur rocket to space (after many attempts), I led the Stratofox tracking team that recovered the rocket from deep in the mountains of Nevada's Black Rock desert. When Jerry started UP Aerospace, it gave us all a hint he likes borrowing acronyms from railroads. 😀 #NewSpace #rocketry #space #business
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20 years ago, June 5 & 6, 2006: I visited the New Mexico Spaceport to see UP Aerospace's new launch pad. This was before Virgin Galactic's runway and terminal were built. So it was a mostly-empty desert with a few dirt roads and this launch pad. It was first. UPA would begin flying commercial suborbital space payloads later that year, and continues to use the site today. #NewSpace #space #business
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20 years ago, June 5 & 6, 2006: I visited the New Mexico Spaceport to see UP Aerospace's new launch pad. This was before Virgin Galactic's runway and terminal were built. So it was a mostly-empty desert with a few dirt roads and this launch pad. It was first. UPA would begin flying commercial suborbital space payloads later that year, and continues to use the site today. #NewSpace #space #business
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Hate Elon Musk as much as you want, but SpaceX denial still isn’t a good look
Last week’s catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket didn’t just incinerate that heavy-lift launch system and much of its support infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36; it also sparked a new round of Space Billionaire Schadenfreude.
Which is understandable. Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos may not have groveled for President Trump’s favor as obsequiously as such fellow tech CEOs as Apple’s Tim Cook or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but he seems more than content to be seen in Trump’s corner. And around my city, Bezos has richly earned D.C.’s contempt for his incompetent lackeys’ wanton dismantling of the Washington Post.
But Bezos is nowhere near the worst space billionaire. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to convince voters to return the worst president to office, oversaw the DOGE ransacking of large parts of the federal government, and continues to exploit his overlordship of X to broadcast racist, misogynistic, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic garbage while amplifying some of the stupidest people on the Internet.
Musk’s accumulation and abuse of economic and political power far exceeds Bezos’s and strikes me as much more dangerous. So my first reaction to Blue’s bad day, after sympathy for engineers who saw years of work go up in a fiery mushroom cloud, was that it represents an unfortunate setback to competition for Musk’s space company on multiple levels, from inflight WiFi to landing astronauts on the Moon. I wrote as much at PCMag and, in compressed form, on Bluesky.
I should have known the reaction that post would get: people bashing not only Blue Origin but also SpaceX and the entire concept of NASA inking commercial contracts to send astronauts to space. Each mishap of SpaceX’s Starship rocket–I have written up every launch of that heavy-lift vehicle in my unofficial role as a PCMag space scribe–reliably generates comments along those lines, suggesting that not only is Starship a doomed design but that SpaceX is a failing exercise in crony capitalism.
That sentiment seems to be widely felt. And it’s nonsense.
Fact: SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9–the core of its launch business, the vehicle on which customers from NASA to would-be rivals to SpaceX’s Starlink keep buying rides–is one of the most reliable rockets ever made.
Per the count at Wikipedia, out of 644 Falcon 9 launches through Thursday, only three have failed to deliver a payload to the right orbit; just one has ended with the loss of a rocket and payload. Only United Launch Alliance’s soon-to-be-retired Atlas V can beat that among launch vehicles with more than 100 liftoffs. The Space Shuttle, as much as I loved seeing it fly, was nowhere near that safe.
SpaceX also deserves credit for terminating a Russian monopoly on crew transport to and from the International Space Station with the Falcon 9-launched Crew Dragon capsule. NASA privatizing that role, years after SpaceX successfully took on delivering supplies to the ISS with the cargo version of Dragon pictured above, stands as an extraordinary accomplishment for the agency.
And yet the Obama administration struggled to sell that notion to Congress 14 years ago; many legislators, leery of a startup proposing to fly even cargo to the ISS, wanted NASA to give all that business to Boeing. Instead, that aerospace giant won one of two commercial-crew awards, and now Boeing’s Starliner capsule has yet be certified for crewed missions six years after Crew Dragon’s debut with astronauts strapped in.
To opine as if this history didn’t happen in public view–or to suggest that NASA could have procured itself an ISS crew system using the traditional contracting processes that yielded the Space Launch System’s years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns–is to exhibit a MAGA level of denial.
That doesn’t mean I have the same confidence in SpaceX developing a version of Starship’s upper stage as a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. More than three years after Starship’s failed debut–followed by 11 more launches that have yet to reach orbit–Starship looks a little star-crossed. I imagine that people at NASA now wonder where we might be if SpaceX had proposed a simpler, smaller lander that could fly on the Falcon 9-derived Falcon Heavy system that NASA already trusts for some of its most important robotic planetary missions.
And yet with New Glenn grounded until at least the end of this year, probably longer, NASA now needs the complex Starship HLS concept to work more than ever. If you would rather not have the next words spoken from the lunar surface be in Mandarin, this should not be a confidence-inducing scenario.
But asking nuanced questions–about whether SpaceX is aiming too high with Starship, if Musk has lost his focus from spending too much time engaging with sycophantic superfans on X, or if recent minor issues with Falcon 9 launches suggest SpaceX is nearing its speed limit for aggressive iteration–clearly can’t be as exciting as posting hot takes on social media.
#AmazonLeo #Artemis #BlueOrigin #Boeing #ElonMusk #Falcon9 #hotTakes #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #JeffBezos #nasa #NewGlenn #newSpace #SpaceX #Starliner #Starlink #Starship -
Hate Elon Musk as much as you want, but SpaceX denial still isn’t a good look
Last week’s catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket didn’t just incinerate that heavy-lift launch system and much of its support infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36; it also sparked a new round of Space Billionaire Schadenfreude.
Which is understandable. Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos may not have groveled for President Trump’s favor as obsequiously as such fellow tech CEOs as Apple’s Tim Cook or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but he seems more than content to be seen in Trump’s corner. And around my city, Bezos has richly earned D.C.’s contempt for his incompetent lackeys’ wanton dismantling of the Washington Post.
But Bezos is nowhere near the worst space billionaire. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to convince voters to return the worst president to office, oversaw the DOGE ransacking of large parts of the federal government, and continues to exploit his overlordship of X to broadcast racist, misogynistic, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic garbage while amplifying some of the stupidest people on the Internet.
Musk’s accumulation and abuse of economic and political power far exceeds Bezos’s and strikes me as much more dangerous. So my first reaction to Blue’s bad day, after sympathy for engineers who saw years of work go up in a fiery mushroom cloud, was that it represents an unfortunate setback to competition for Musk’s space company on multiple levels, from inflight WiFi to landing astronauts on the Moon. I wrote as much at PCMag and, in compressed form, on Bluesky.
I should have known the reaction that post would get: people bashing not only Blue Origin but also SpaceX and the entire concept of NASA inking commercial contracts to send astronauts to space. Each mishap of SpaceX’s Starship rocket–I have written up every launch of that heavy-lift vehicle in my unofficial role as a PCMag space scribe–reliably generates comments along those lines, suggesting that not only is Starship a doomed design but that SpaceX is a failing exercise in crony capitalism.
That sentiment seems to be widely felt. And it’s nonsense.
Fact: SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9–the core of its launch business, the vehicle on which customers from NASA to would-be rivals to SpaceX’s Starlink keep buying rides–is one of the most reliable rockets ever made.
Per the count at Wikipedia, out of 644 Falcon 9 launches through Thursday, only three have failed to deliver a payload to the right orbit; just one has ended with the loss of a rocket and payload. Only United Launch Alliance’s soon-to-be-retired Atlas V can beat that among launch vehicles with more than 100 liftoffs. The Space Shuttle, as much as I loved seeing it fly, was nowhere near that safe.
SpaceX also deserves credit for terminating a Russian monopoly on crew transport to and from the International Space Station with the Falcon 9-launched Crew Dragon capsule. NASA privatizing that role, years after SpaceX successfully took on delivering supplies to the ISS with the cargo version of Dragon pictured above, stands as an extraordinary accomplishment for the agency.
And yet the Obama administration struggled to sell that notion to Congress 14 years ago; many legislators, leery of a startup proposing to fly even cargo to the ISS, wanted NASA to give all that business to Boeing. Instead, that aerospace giant won one of two commercial-crew awards, and now Boeing’s Starliner capsule has yet be certified for crewed missions six years after Crew Dragon’s debut with astronauts strapped in.
To opine as if this history didn’t happen in public view–or to suggest that NASA could have procured itself an ISS crew system using the traditional contracting processes that yielded the Space Launch System’s years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns–is to exhibit a MAGA level of denial.
That doesn’t mean I have the same confidence in SpaceX developing a version of Starship’s upper stage as a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. More than three years after Starship’s failed debut–followed by 11 more launches that have yet to reach orbit–Starship looks a little star-crossed. I imagine that people at NASA now wonder where we might be if SpaceX had proposed a simpler, smaller lander that could fly on the Falcon 9-derived Falcon Heavy system that NASA already trusts for some of its most important robotic planetary missions.
And yet with New Glenn grounded until at least the end of this year, probably longer, NASA now needs the complex Starship HLS concept to work more than ever. If you would rather not have the next words spoken from the lunar surface be in Mandarin, this should not be a confidence-inducing scenario.
But asking nuanced questions–about whether SpaceX is aiming too high with Starship, if Musk has lost his focus from spending too much time engaging with sycophantic superfans on X, or if recent minor issues with Falcon 9 launches suggest SpaceX is nearing its speed limit for aggressive iteration–clearly can’t be as exciting as posting hot takes on social media.
#AmazonLeo #Artemis #BlueOrigin #Boeing #ElonMusk #Falcon9 #hotTakes #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #JeffBezos #nasa #NewGlenn #newSpace #SpaceX #Starliner #Starlink #Starship -
"Blue Origin says rocket explosion spared fuel tanks and key launch pad parts" by @AssociatedPress / Marcia Dunn - #BlueOrigin reports damage to #NewGlenn launch pad vicinity may be more quickly repairable than originally expected, possibly flying again by the end of the year. https://apnews.com/article/bezos-blue-origin-rocket-explosion-new-glenn-9d7ea73d581ba15d1fe0f9f6e948b663 #NewSpace #space #business
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"Blue Origin says rocket explosion spared fuel tanks and key launch pad parts" by @AssociatedPress / Marcia Dunn - #BlueOrigin reports damage to #NewGlenn launch pad vicinity may be more quickly repairable than originally expected, possibly flying again by the end of the year. https://apnews.com/article/bezos-blue-origin-rocket-explosion-new-glenn-9d7ea73d581ba15d1fe0f9f6e948b663 #NewSpace #space #business
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"Why the failure of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is so catastrophic" by @arstechnica / @sciguyspace - The #BlueOrigin #NewGlenn rocket explosion is a setback not just for the company but also for NASA's Artemis lunar landing schedule, now likely delayed again. https://arstechnica.com/features/2026/05/heres-why-the-failure-of-blue-origins-new-glenn-rocket-is-so-catastrophic/ #NewSpace #space #business
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"Blue Origin investigates rocket explosion as public is warned about possible wreckage washing ashore" by @AssociatedPress / Marcia Dunn - Morning light revealed details on damage to Launch Complex 36, with only one tower and a water tank standing. Debris that washes ashore should be considered hazardous due to toxic propellants used by thrusters. The primary propellants of liquid oxygen and LNG (methane) leave no residue. https://apnews.com/article/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-explosion-a69e249784c277b0d08ac8c246b21a6d #BlueOrigin #NewGlenn #NewSpace #space #business
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In 2016, a hot-fire test explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 lost AMOS-6, the first and only satellite built for Facebook. Since then F9 hot-fires don't have payloads stacked. FB never attempted a satellite project again (which is probably for the better). #BlueOrigin appears to have heeded the historical lesson from the competition's mistake by not stacking payloads on the #NewGlenn rocket before the hot-fire test. Because the risks are real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS-6_(satellite)#Destruction #NewSpace #space #business
