Hello and welcome back to JS Space. I hope everyone is having a fantastic 4th of July this week. Go eat a hot dog.
Read my story from last week about the reasons for the additional Starliner delay and what it could mean for Boeing's Starliner program.
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The undeniable story of the week is the massive $843 million contract NASA has awarded to SpaceX to develop the vehicle that will deorbit the International Space Station. Once the station enters Earth’s atmosphere, it will burn up, but the contract is to ensure that it does so in a way that is safe for people on the ground. Details about the American Deorbit Vehicle, as it’s being called, are scant, but a NASA official did say that it would be based on hardware from “Dragon Heritage.”
Check out my story on Starfish Space’s new deal with Intelsat. The GEO service market is still a few years away, but deals like this show it’s a lot closer than the haters might think…
NASA has an article titled “Fourth of July Holidays in Space” and folks — it’s every bit as fun as the title suggests. Apparently there wasn’t a 4th of July celebration in space until 1982, with the second one happening 10 years later! Now that we have a constant presence of NASA astronauts aboard the ISS, such celebrations are an annual event. All I can say is: God bless the stars-and-stripes pants in space.
