GoKawiil
Tech News
A decade after SpaceX first successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 booster in December 2015, reusable rockets have removed launch access as the industry's main bottleneck. The constraint has shifted toward manufacturing enough satellites, securing sufficient funding, and finding enough paying customers.
Sierra Space, a Sierra Nevada Corporation subsidiary, conducted two high-altitude balloon drop tests of its Ghost reentry vehicle, releasing it from 35,000 and 68,500 feet carrying a bottle of whiskey and a software-defined radio. The tests, part of U.S. Space Command's Apollo Nexus training exercise, mark the vehicle's first trial in two years and aimed to show that liquids and electronics could survive reentry and landing intact.
NASA and Katalyst Space attempted to use a robotic probe called LINK to grab the aging Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and push it back into a stable orbit, but the probe suffered altitude-control failures shortly after its July launch, forcing cancellation of the mission. Swift, launched in 2004, is now expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up as soon as later this year, sooner than the 2030 estimate scientists once projected.