¶Flight 6. Starship Flight 6 went off without a huge amount of fanfare, paving the way for a coming year where flights will likely become much more commonplace (cf. our recent coverage). An upgraded Ship, carrying a payload of a Banana for Scale™, took off from Boca Chica in the afternoon (the first afternoon flight for Starship). No catch attempt happened on this flight as a “booster offshore divert” was called shortly after stage separation, possibly due to comms tower damage. The upper stage relit a Raptor in space for the first time, taking one more step toward full orbital insertion. Starship S31, the last of the Block 1 design, still sustained some flap burn-through (perhaps due to its more aggressive angle of attack or intentionally-removed tiles) but still performed a successful daytime soft landing in the Indian Ocean. |
|
 | Banana for payload. |
|
The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:
 |
|
¶IM-2. Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lunar mission, IM-2, carries the Nova-C lander (“Athena”) and is now targeting a launch in February. IM’s first CLPS mission landed, albeit roughly, on the Moon in February 2024, becoming the first soft landing on the Moon by a private company (and the first American landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first methalox engine fired beyond LEO). For IM-2, IM is seriously upping their game, with multiple rovers and hoppers onboard and a target of the Moon’s south pole in an area around 89°S where water ice could be within the range of the lander’s 1 meter Honeybee Robotics TRIDENT drill. In addition to the drill, a mass spectrometer for material analysis, and multiple other science and commercial payloads, the lander also carries IM’s Micro Nova (µNova), a hydrazine-propelled one-meter tall hopper with its own high-resolution cameras, a neutron spectrometer to look for water as it transits permanently shadowed craters, a radiometer, and a Nokia 4G antenna. The lander will also deploy Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover. MAPP will carry depth cameras, collect soil samples for symbolic transfer to NASA, test a lunar 4G/LTE network for Nokia & NASA, and even carry its own tiny rover from MIT for self-inspection called AstroAnt. It’s pretty much just rovers all the way down. IM-2’s launch will also contain some hitchhiking rideshares: Lunar Trailblazer (an orbiter designed to map lunar water at high-resolution), a lunar comms satellite, AstroForge’s Odin (a rapidly-built deep space smallsat intended to photograph an undisclosed M-type asteroid), and others. |
|
 | A bunch of AstroAnts, examples of the tiny inspection rover that will be on the larger MAPP rover that will be on the Nova-C lander that will be on, hopefully, the Moon’s south pole early next year. |
|
¶Sentinel-1C and Vega-C close in on launch. The newest addition to the Sentinel family has been fueled for launch ahead of its December 3rd take-off from Korou, French Guiana. Sentinel-1C will ride to space on Vega-C’s return-to-flight launch. Vega-C suffered a loss of payload during its second flight, grounding Europe’s next-generation low-cost domestic launch option for the past two years. The second stage malfunction was traced to the Zefiro 40 solid rocket engine’s carbon-carbon nozzle throat insert. After a change in supplier to ArianeGroup for the carbon-carbon insert, its recertification test… also failed. This led ESA to require a redesign of the entire engine nozzle. That redesign, while slow and costly, seems to have worked, with both tests successful earlier this year (the first at high pressure/short duration and the most recent one at low pressure/long duration). Assuming next month’s launch goes well, Sentinel-1C will become the newest addition to the EU’s Copernicus program, taking the place of 1B, which unexpectedly stopped functioning, ending its mission in 2022. 1C is offset 180° from Sentinel-1A (due to be replaced by 1D next year) to provide full-Earth observation in C-band SAR for climate/Earth-science applications as well as disaster response. 1C also packs four new nautical AIS receivers for tracking shipping (with the radar helping to track “silent” vessels as well). The program was initially accelerated due to 1B’s untimely demise but had to wait on its launch vehicle while the Vega-C program was on hold. |
|
Support Us› Orbital Index is made possible by readers like you. If you appreciate our writing, please support us with a monthly membership! |
|
| ¶News in brief. Denmark became the 48th nation to sign the Artemis Accords ● Firefly Aerospace raised a $175M Series D to increase production of their Alpha launch vehicle ● For the second time this year, JPL reduced its workforce, this time by 5%, due to budget uncertainty from lack of future deep space missions ● Russia delayed its Zond-M solar monitoring spacecraft project due to budget cuts ● Pakistan's space agency SUPARCO plans to develop a 35-kg rover that will fly to the moon on China’s Chang'e-8 mission ● China launched the first Haiyang-4 oceanography satellite ● Starfish Space raised $29M to complete development of its first three Otter servicing vehicles ● China’s Lijian-1 (Kinetica-1) solid rocket launched 15 satellites (including China’s first commercial international payload for Oman) ● Reaction Engines, a decades-old British company that was developing the SABRE engine for a possible single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, declared bankruptcy (first mentioned in Issue № 4!) ● Spire sold its commercial ship tracking business for $241M, burning down its $100M in debt ● NASA extended the existing ISS commercial resupply contracts with Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, and SpaceX through 2030; they were set to expire at the end of 2026 ● Space robotics specialist GITAI raised $15.5M to expand into the in-orbit servicing market ● Per a statement from the CEO, ABL Systems is pivoting from launch vehicles to missile defense (remember, there’s always money in the military-industrial complex) ● Rocket Lab secured its first customer for Neutron, an undisclosed “commercial satellite constellation operator” that signed two launches starting in 2026 ● Meanwhile, AST SpaceMobile selected New Glenn—in addition to previous plans to use Falcon 9 and India’s GSLV—to launch their exceptionally large and bright BlueBird direct-to-cell constellation with the goal of launching 60 satellites in 2025 and 2026 ● The Exploration Company raised a $160M Series B to continue developing the Nyx cargo spacecraft, set to become Europe’s first reusable space capsule ● China launched a cargo spacecraft to Tiangong which included a suite of experiments, including one to test the durability of bricks made of lunar regolith simulant for future lunar habitats. |
|
 | The bricks shown here are made of lunar regolith simulant (aka not real lunar soil) and were launched aboard Tianzhou-8 to be placed outside the Tiangong station for ~3 years to study how they behave in the space environment. |
|
|
