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In the same seven-day period, we watched Boeing’s Starliner launch astronauts to space for the first time, and then we got to watch those two astronauts dock with the International Space Station.
And we also got to see SpaceX launch Starship for the fourth time ever — and then bring it back home.
I think I’m not alone in thinking that some of the most spectacular images in the history of rocketry were generated during that flight.
Of course, the mission isn’t over yet: After around a week aboard the station, the two astronauts will re-board Starliner and use it to get back home.
It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars.
Announced today, NASA has awarded $1.5 million contracts to seven companies to further develop their plans for the revamped Mars Sample Return mission.
According to the request for proposal, studies could be for complete overhauls of the mission design, or for designs that include elements of NASA’s MSR mission or NASA’s Artemis program.
NASA turned to private industry after finally admitting that its architecture for MSR is incredibly complicated.
Last year, an independent review board recommended that NASA revisit the mission design given the concerns about the technical features and the high costs.
But to reuse, you have to recover, and SpaceX is proving that it will be able to do just that with Starship.
The ultimate goal is to fly Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage back to Starbase, SpaceX’s private Starship launch and development site in southeast Texas, where they’d make vertical landings on solid ground.
Starship lifted off from Starbase at 8:50 AM CT, the fourth launch in the rocket test campaign.
A little over an hour after launch, Starship followed suit, surviving the extreme heat from traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
During that test, SpaceX also tested capabilities that will be key for delivering payload to space, including opening and closing the payload door.
Former senior SpaceX executive Tom Ochinero is teaming up with SpaceX alum-turned-VC, Achal Upadhyaya, and one of Sequoia’s top finance leaders, Spencer Hemphill, on a new venture called Interlagos Capital, TechCrunch has learned.
There is little public information available about Interlagos, and the trio did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Ochinero, Upadhyaya and Hemphill are all listed on the documents.
Ochinero is just the latest SpaceX executive to move from the behemoth space company into venture investing.
Other notable investors in the SpaceX-to-VC pipeline include Founders Fund’s Scott Nolan, who was a very early SpaceX employee, and Alpine Space Ventures’ Bulent Alton.
That was also the year SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink satellites.
The company was spending plenty of cash on research and development, too — $559 million in 2018 and $661 million the following year.
The Starlink program completed a milestone in 2019, when SpaceX launched the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in May of that year.
The company ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of $868 million for 2018 and $990 million for 2019.
The company launches its Starlink satellites with its own rocket, its Falcon 9 workhorse, which means it can launch the space-based internet satellites at unprecedented rates.
Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit.
The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals.
Indeed, Varda’s first mission, which returned to Earth in February after 10-months in orbit, does not mark the first time a drug has been crystallized in microgravity.
Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle.
The startup’s next manufacturing mission will launch later this year, and the team plans to land that spacecraft in Australia.
SpaceX has performed 13 crewed missions, and all of them launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
But the company has long intended to upgrade a second pad — SLC-40 at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — to expand its crew launch capacity.
Teams test the new emergency chutes from the pad 40 crew tower in Florida pic.twitter.com/rWVj7zaHp0 — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 19, 2024As a next step, SpaceX is going to launch the CRS-30 cargo resupply mission.
In a media teleconference in February, SpaceX’s VP of build and flight reliability, Bill Gerstenmaier, said the cargo flight is an incremental step to astronaut launches.
“We would like to do a cargo flight first if we can.
Los Angeles-based Gitai said Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has nailed a tech demonstration outside the International Space Station.
Autonomous robotic systems still have a ways to go before they render human labor obsolete, especially here on Earth; but in space, human labor is expensive (and dangerous), which provides an opening for a robotic alternative.
The 1.5-meter autonomous robotic arm, which the startup calls S2, launched to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in January.
In the nearer term, the company is targeting on-orbit satellite servicing for spacecraft in low Earth orbit and geostationary orbit.
The arm’s technology readiness level (TLR), a standard used by NASA to chart the maturity of technology, is now at 7, the highest level, Gitai said.
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I was finally able to catch up on this February 2024 space stock review from Case Taylor, an investor at Thomas Tull’s U.S.
He provides a lot of sharp commentary on the public space companies, and as someone without a finance background, I feel like I learn a lot.
This week in space historyOn March 21, 2007, a small but mighty company called SpaceX launched its Falcon 1 rocket for the second time.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days.
This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options.
X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Grok — developed by Musk’s AI startup, xAI — was released last year, armed with features such as access to “real-time” information on X and views undeterred by “politically correct” norms.
On Found, Becca and Dom spoke with Rebecca Hu, the CEO and co-founder of Glacier, an AI robotics company that’s building robots to accurately sort recycling.
