Rocket Report: Russia pledges quick fix for Soyuz launch pad; Ariane 6 aims high

SpaceX warns of dangerous Chinese launch. China's recent deployment of nine satellites came dangerously close to a Starlink satellite, said SpaceX's vice president of Starlink engineering. Michael Nicholls wrote in a Dec. 12 social media post that there was a 200-meter approach between the satellite launched Dec. 10 by China's Kinetica-1 rocket and SpaceX's Starlink-6079 spacecraft at an altitude of 560 kilometers (348 miles). Reports from the Week of Aviation and Space Technologies. “Much of the risk in space operations comes from a lack of coordination between satellite operators – this needs to change,” Nicholls wrote.

Blaming the client... CAS Space, the company responsible for the Kinetica-1 rocket, responded to Nicholls' message on X, saying it would “work to identify the exact details and provide assistance.” In a follow-up report on December 13, CAS Space said the dangerous signal, if confirmed, occurred nearly 48 hours after the satellite separated from the Kinetica-1 rocket, by which time the launch mission had long since ended. “CAS Space will coordinate with satellite operators to continue operations.”

South Korean startup is ready to launch. Innospace, a South Korean space startup, will launch its independently developed Hanbit-Nano commercial rocket as early as Friday. The business newspaper Maeil reports this.. The rocket launches from the Alcantara spaceport in Brazil. The small launcher will attempt to deliver eight small payloads, including five deployable satellites, into low Earth orbit. The launch was delayed two days to allow technicians time to replace components of the first stage oxidizer feed cooling system.

Hybrid powertrain… This will be the first launch of Innospace's Hanbit-Nano rocket. The launcher has two stages and is 71 feet (21.7 meters) high and 4.6 feet (1.4 meters) in diameter. The Hanbit-Nano is a true micro-launcher capable of launching a payload mass of up to 200 pounds (90 kilograms) into sun-synchronous orbit. It has a unique design: hybrid engines use a mixture of paraffin as fuel and liquid oxygen as an oxidizer.

Ten years since an important milestone in rocket technology. On December 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the first time. Ars reprinted a slightly abridged chapter from book Reentryauthored by senior space editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. chapter begins in June 2015 when a Falcon 9 rocket failed during the launch of a resupply mission to the International Space Station, and ends with a powerful behind-the-scenes look at the Falcon 9 launch vehicle's historic first landing to cap the year.