SpaceX warns of dangerous Chinese launch. China's recent deployment of nine satellites took place dangerously close to a Starlink satellite, SpaceX's vice president of Starlink Engineering said. Michael Nicolls wrote in a Dec. 12 social media post that there was a close approach of 200 meters between a satellite launched Dec. 10 on a Chinese Kinetica-1 rocket and SpaceX's Starlink-6079 spacecraft at an altitude of 560 kilometers (348 miles), Aviation Week and Space Technology reported. “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators – this must change,” Nicolls wrote.
Blaming the customer... The company responsible for the Kinetica-1 rocket, CAS Space, responded to Nicolls' post on In a follow-up post on December 13, CAS Space said the close call, if confirmed, occurred nearly 48 hours after the satellite separated from the Kinetica-1 rocket, by which time the launch mission had long been over. “CAS Space will work with satellite operators to move forward.”
A South Korean startup is ready to fly. Innospace, a South Korean space startup, will launch its independently developed commercial rocket, Hanbit-Nano, as early as Friday, reports the Maeil Business Newspaper. The rocket will take off from the Alcântara Space Center in Brazil. The small launch vehicle will attempt to deliver eight small payloads, including five deployable satellites, into low Earth orbit. The launch was delayed two days to give technicians time to replace components of the first stage oxidizer supply cooling system.
Hybrid propulsion… This will be the first launch of Innospace's Hanbit-Nano rocket. The launcher has two stages and is 21.7 meters high and has a diameter of 1.4 meters. Hanbit-Nano is a true micro-launcher, capable of delivering up to 90 kilograms of payload into a sun-synchronous orbit. It has a unique design, where hybrid engines use a mixture of paraffin as fuel and liquid oxygen as an oxidant.
Ten years since a milestone in rocketry. On December 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That evening, just days before Christmas, the party successfully landed the first leg for the first time. Ars has reprinted a slightly abridged chapter from the book Re-enterwritten by Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and published in 2024. The chapter begins in June 2015 with the failure of a Falcon 9 rocket during the launch of a resupply mission to the International Space Station and ends with a vivid behind-the-scenes story of the historic first landing of a Falcon 9 booster to end the year.
