Quite a lot of methalox rockets are approaching launch, with the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan rocket completing its flight readiness firing. What’s more, the wildfires currently raging in Canada have been studied from space using a plethora of weather statement satellites, and the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) advanced extragalactic survey data was officially released.
SpaceX also added two more Falcon 9 missions to their yearly tally this week and a Chinese semi-private launch company launched some very secretive payloads into orbit.
Three methalox rockets are marching toward their upcoming launches: ULA’s Vulcan, Landspace’s ZhuQue-2, and SpaceX’s Starship.
Vulcan finally performed its Flight Readiness Firing this week after several delays as a consequence of issues with the engine igniters. With a fix in place, ULA rolled the rocket out to the pad on June 6 and proceeded to check the igniters before loading propellant onto the vehicle – thus ensuring the brand new igniters worked ahead of the beginning of the countdown.
One other milestone Vulcan achieved ahead of its static fire was a recycle test. During a recycle test, the clock counts right down to a simulated T0 and is then held seconds before engine ignition. A simulated abort is known as after which the count moves back to the “T-7 minutes and holding” mark on Vulcan’s countdown.
After a three-hour delay as a consequence of weather, ULA finally resumed the count and went ahead with the firing of Vulcan’s two BE-4 engines on June 8 at 9:05 PM EDT (01:05 UTC on June 9). ULA later confirmed on Twitter that the test ran for the expected duration and that the corporate would now begin preparations for Vulcan’s first flight. Preparing Vulcan for flight will see the completion of the investigation right into a Centaur V test stand anomaly that occurred earlier this 12 months.
ULA will likely release more information closer to the test flight as Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is shipped to Florida for integration with Vulcan and other pre-launch activities happen.
On the opposite side of the world in China, LandSpace’s ZhuQue-2 (ZQ-2) rocket has been rolled out to the pad for a launch that is anticipated to occur in only a couple of days.
It seems that Landspace has rolled ZhuQue-2 out to the launch pad ahead of the vehicle’s second orbital launch attempt from Jiuquan later this month. pic.twitter.com/iLBmomghs7
— Harry Stranger (@Harry__Stranger) June 8, 2023
This might be ZQ-2’s second attempt to achieve space with its first flight ending in failure last December. On its first flight, a failure on the second stage vernier engines caused the rocket to not reach the speed needed to achieve orbit. LandSpace claims it has solved this issue, and in that case, ZQ-2 will win the “race” to be the primary methalox rocket to orbit if this second flight succeeds.
At Starbase, recent road closures have been scheduled for next week as seen on Cameron County’s website. These are believed to be for static fire testing of Ship 25 ahead of the following launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
![](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Cameron-County-closures.jpg)
Closures scheduled for next week at Starbase (Credit: Cameron County)
For this launch, Booster 9 will probably be used and need to be tested in the next weeks and months. Nevertheless, this testing will only have the opportunity to occur once all repair and upgrade work on the orbital launch mount has been accomplished.
German aerospace company Rocket Factory Augsburg has accomplished a full-duration firing of their Helix engine.
The test was conducted at the corporate’s test site on the Esrange Space Center in Sweden and ran for 280 seconds. The Helix engine is the primary privately-developed staged combustion cycle engine in Europe and can power the corporate’s RFA One rocket. This rocket will sport nine Helix engines on the primary stage and one single vacuum-optimized Helix engine on the upper stage.
For this test, the Helix engine was also attached to a prototype RFA One second stage tank and systems, which also validated the rocket’s upper-stage performance in what the corporate calls an “integrated system test”.
This puts RFA only one step closer to launching Europe’s first privately-developed rocket into space and into orbit — but provided that it may possibly beat the remainder. RFA is just not alone on this race, there are at the very least two more major European private corporations working on orbital rockets: PLD Space from Spain and Isar Aerospace from Germany.
Canada’s raging wildfires are burning hundreds of hectares of land and their effects are being studied not only from the bottom but in addition from space.
![](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/MODIS-photo-of-the-fires-in-Quebec.jpg)
Picture from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite from the fires in Quebec as seen on June 3 (Credit: NASA)
While ground pictures from cities like Recent York City have been within the news throughout the world this past week, the scope and damage of those fires could be seen much more broadly from space. Multiple satellites from different agencies and firms have been retasked in the previous few weeks to check these fires to raised help combat them and learn from them.
While these fires are expected to occur around this time of 12 months, they’ve already expanded to over 160,000 hectares of land. During a median 12 months, only about 247 hectares are burned.
![](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NYC-in-a-cloud-of-smoke-at-seen-from-USS-Intrepid-scaled.jpeg)
Recent York City under the cloud of smoke from Canada’s fires as seen from the USS Intrepid (Credit: Elysia Segal)
These images from space all show how, over the span of just a couple of days, the smoke from these fires has amassed and drifted south into the northeastern regions of america. The smoke has already covered lots of of kilometers of land and has raised the degrees of wonderful particulate matter within the air to record-breaking numbers.
Planet released two images this week comparing the presence of smoke in Recent York City before and after the fires as seen from space. These images, in addition to other images and data captured from space, are helping scientists understand how particulates within the atmosphere travel over long distances.
Different layers of air move in several directions and thus, depending on their size, some particles could also be in a single layer or one other up within the atmosphere. Which means different parts of the atmosphere can have different amounts of smoke depending on the situation – which is very important for authorities chargeable for predicting hazardous health conditions in certain areas.
Recent York City, covered in haze, as a consequence of the continuing wildfires in Canada.
📸 (1): PlanetScope • Recent York City, USA • June 1, 2023
📸 (2): PlanetScope • Recent York City, USA • June 7, 2023 pic.twitter.com/FMl3xQBGvw— Planet (@planet) June 8, 2023
These observations are one other example of the importance of studying Earth from space. Gathering scientific data on the expanse and effects of natural events across the globe allows scientists to predict their effects and thus protect people against disasters just like the Canadian wildfires.
Firefly Aerospace has acquired Spaceflight Inc., a move that rearranges the corporate’s vision of its future.
Spaceflight Inc.’s operations until now have consisted of arranging flights for small satellite operators, integrating their payloads on different rockets, and deploying them from those rockets once in orbit. The corporate also developed the SHERPA satellite dispenser which later evolved into an orbital tug that would power and place customer payloads right into a more precise final orbit.
Big news today! Firefly is acquiring Spaceflight Inc. to further grow our on-orbit capabilities and repair the complete lifecycle of our customers’ payloads. Learn more in regards to the acquisition here: https://t.co/PMR8hlTLa2.
— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) June 8, 2023
Firefly claims that this acquisition will allow the corporate to mix Spaceflight Inc.’s capabilities with its launch services for a full end-to-end service for purchasers. These capabilities can even be added on top of the event of Firefly’s Medium Launch Vehicle, Space Utility Vehicle, and Blue Ghost lunar lander.
Under recent ownership, Spaceflight Inc. says it’s going to perform all of its remaining contracts on rockets from other corporations, but recent customers will exclusively use Firefly’s Alpha and future medium launch vehicles.
This week saw the discharge of the outcomes from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
The outcomes were presented as an element of the most recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Not only did the outcomes reveal 45,000+ galaxies in a single image, but in addition they highlighted how JWST has grow to be a robust tool for scientists to know the secrets of the early universe.
As mentioned, the JADES data revealed over 45,000 galaxies, with several thousand galaxies within the image existing when the universe was between 500 and 850 million years old. These galaxies are situated thus far away that their light has been stretched over time as a consequence of the expansion of the universe – an effect that is known as redshift. Which means the sunshine emitted by them has shifted wavelengths from the ultraviolet and visual parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to infrared – a wavelength of sunshine Webb was precisely designed to watch.
![](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/stsci-01h1q2vfhvmajgh4wrnmk0dy52.png)
A deep field taken by Webb as a part of the JADES results. An area of the asky often called GOODS-South is seen on this image. (Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Brant Robertson/Ben Johnson/Sandro Tacchella/Marcia Rieke/Daniel Eisenstein/Alyssa Pagan)
The further away a galaxy is, the more red-shifted its light will probably be. Using Webb’s different filters and instruments to capture the galaxies’ spectrums, scientists were in a position to measure the redshift of hundreds of galaxies without delay, with lots of of those galaxies now found at record-breaking redshifts and distances.
This recent data has also allowed scientists to know the speed of star formation within the early universe, in addition to study the complex structures that formed inside galaxies during that era. The information suggests that these early galaxies had a extremely high rate of star formation and already hosted complex structures inside them very much like those we see today. This means that galaxy evolution could have occurred much faster than previously thought.
Although Webb has been in operation for lower than a 12 months, the observatory is already rewriting the books on astrophysics and cosmology.
The Shenzhou-15 ended this week because the crew successfully returned to Earth from the Tiangong Space Station.
Shenzhou-15 launched on Nov. 29, 2022, carrying taikonauts Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu. The crew spent around six months onboard Tiangong conducting scientific experiments, carrying out 4 spacewalks to upgrade the station, and deploying satellites.
With the launch of Shenzhou-16 last week, the Shenzhou-15 crew handed over command of the station to the brand new crew and departed the orbital laboratory. Undocking from the station’s forward docking port occurred on June 3 at 13:29 UTC.
Shenzhou-15 and its crew of three have landed. pic.twitter.com/KWzFCduoFM
— Chris Bergin – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) June 3, 2023
Several orbits later, Shenzhou-15 jettisoned its orbital module and began its deorbit burn for re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Landing of the spacecraft’s descent module successfully occurred within the Gobi Desert at 22:33 UTC later that day.
This Week in Launches
A Falcon 9 lifted off on June 4 at 8:20 PM EDT (12:20 UTC on June 5) from Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida carrying more Starlink v2 Mini satellites for Starlink’s second-generation constellation. The primary stage, B1078, was flying for a 3rd time and successfully landed on SpaceX’s droneship .
This launch added 22 Starlink satellites into orbit bringing up the entire variety of these satellites launched to 4,543. Of those, 4,218 satellites remain in orbit and three,551 are in operational orbit.
One other Falcon 9 lifted off on June 5 at 10:47 AM EDT (15:47 UTC) from Launch Complex 39A in Florida carrying the CRS-28 Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). The primary stage, B1077, was flying for a fifth time and landed successfully on the droneship .
This was the third SpaceX launch featuring the shortened MVac nozzle extension on the upper stage.
Dragon accomplished an 18-hour rendezvous and docked to the zenith docking port on the ISS module the following day, June 6, at 09:54 UTC. The spacecraft carried 3,304 kilograms of payloads onboard, including a brand new pair of ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays that will probably be installed on the Station in the approaching weeks.
A Lijian-1 rocket lifted off on June 7, at 04:10 UTC from Site 130 on the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China.
The rocket carried 26 payloads onboard, including two Shiyan experimental satellites for the Chinese government. Many of the rocket’s other payloads are unknown on the time of publication.
China confirmed the rocket inserted all payloads successfully into their goal Sun-synchronous orbit, completing the successful second flight of the rocket after debuting in July of last 12 months.
A Kuaizhou 1A rocket lifted off on June 9, at 02:35 UTC from Site 95A on the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China carrying the Longjiang 3 satellite into low-Earth orbit (LEO).
The spacecraft is a prototype communication satellite by the Harbin Institute of Technology geared toward testing a brand new flat-packed satellite platform similar in shape to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. This sort of platform could possibly be used for future LEO communication satellite constellations from China.