Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Mission Notes
A Space Daily column

Mission Notes

Spaceflight and industry

Mission Notes follows the business and engineering of spaceflight. Rockets, satellites, contracts, and the industry behind the missions. Space Daily has reported on this beat since 1995, when the launch industry was a fraction of its current size.

Science

The Soviet Buran shuttle flew exactly once, in November 1988, completing two unmanned orbits and landing itself in a crosswind on a Kazakh runway with such precision that engineers found it stopped within 3 metres of the centreline — and then the program was cancelled and the orbiter was crushed 14 years later when its hangar roof collapsed.

In November 1988, the Soviet Buran shuttle launched from Baikonur, orbited Earth twice, and landed itself in a crosswind snowstorm with no crew aboard. It never flew again. Fourteen years later a collapsing hangar roof crushed the only spacecraft that had ever completed a fully automated orbital mission.

Spacemart

In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else’s constellation

The HummingSat is a geostationary communications satellite roughly the size of an industrial washing machine, and it weighs about a ton — around a fifth the…