Max Q - An inspirational quartet heads to space and back

This week, the first four-person all-civilian crew of space explorers took a very unique three-day tour. Also, SpaceX started a key expansion of its Starlink service and signalled it would soon exit beta.

Inspiration4 trip goes to plan

SpaceX sent up its first private passengers using a Dragon spacecraft last week, with a launch Wednesday night from Florida. The four-person ‘Inspiration4’ crew was selected based on criteria set by mission patron and sponsor Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who entered the mission around a fundraise for St. Jude Children’s Hospital.

The four spent three days on orbit, slightly higher above the Earth than the International Space Station’s own orbiting path. During that time, they made a bunch of video calls, ran some experiments, and spent some time reproing their Netflix show and taking in the views with the Dragon’s newly affixed cupola transparent dome.

This whole thing felt weirdly a little less impressive than it actually should’ve been on paper, and also didn’t really seem to draw as much attention as I would’ve expected. Maybe people are a little too exhausted from the pandemic to muster much enthusiasm for billionaires paying for space rides for them and some friends.

Regardless, it’s a big achievement not only for SpaceX, but also for NASA, since this is exactly what the agency was hoping to achieve with their commercial crew program: Private development of a human-rated spacecraft they could use, but that would also be paid for in part by private bookings.

The foursome made it back to Earth safely with a Dragon capsule splashdown on Sunday, too, so consider that one a complete success in the history books.

SpaceX starts building phase 2 of Starlink

SpaceX has begun launching satellites from California to blanket a different swath of the Earth with high-speed Internet. This new group will join the existing 1,800 or so already on orbit, and it sounds like SpaceX is now confident enough in the service where it is available to take the ‘beta’ label off, since Elon tweeted they’d be doing that very shortly.

This next group will still need a lot more launches to ramp up reach and capacity, when you consider that nearly 2,000 satellites were required to service the existing 100,000 or so customers in the existing geographies offered for the beta.

SpaceX and Blue Origin awards future lunar lander contracts

Blue Origin may still be locked in a legal battle with NASA over its award of a lunar contract for the first Artemis program moon landing, but it is now also a partner of the agency in designing future lander concepts.

SpaceX and Dynetics were also awarded via this new contract process, and satisfying the contracts will require designing lander systems for future missions in the Artemis program, which aims to continually ferry people to the moon over the next couple of decades at least.

Join us at TC Sessions: Space in December

Last year we held our first dedicated space event, and it went so well that we decided to host it again in 2021. This year, it’s happening December 14 and 15, and it’s once again going to be an entirely virtual conference, so people from all over the world will be able to join — and you can, too.

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