Well, they aren’t quite dead yet:
I don’t want to go on the cart! (Oh, don’t be such a baby)
This is more planetary science than it is launch system development, but I thought some of y’all might enjoy seeing these articles on recent research results:
Any story that states a need for “a huge hot buttery network of seismometers” gets a thumbs up from me.
Space exploration is in the title of this thread, not launch system development (which if you think about it is the bit right before the space exploration starts, though still absolutely on topic as far as I’m concerned)
Planetary science is space exploration!
Thanks for these links, the Mars mysteries article was particularly interesting.
Understood. But somehow launch system development, and the concomitant business highlights and lowlights, seems to be a perennial topic here.
Consider my intro as the equivalent of Monty Python’s
And now for something completely different …
Just a way to signal a transition within the overall flow.
Of course. It’s hard to explore space in detail unless we have instruments out there making measurements not blocked by the atmosphere, and we have to get them out of the gravity well somehow?
So recently the Lucy spacecraft went by the asteroid Dinkinesh and discovered it had a satellite.
Cool, but not too surprising.
Well now it has found out that Dinkinesh has TWO satellites that are a contact pair, the first contact pair found orbiting another asteroid.
Brian
It’s satellites all the way down.
Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, one of the first three humans to see the moon up close, has died:
Sad news 
I think it means there are only four living lunar astronauts left alive today.
Eight, assuming you count the ones that circled the moon.
Living astronauts that set foot on the moon:
Buzz Aldrin
David Scott
Charles Duke
Harrison Schmitt
And ones that circled the moon (which included Borman):
Jim Lovell
Bill Anders
Tom Stafford
Fred Haise
Of course, Boorman never actually landed so the number of living astronauts who have walked on the moon is the same today as it was on Monday.
My post from the dedicate Ken Mattingly thread which now includes Borman too:
“…good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
I believe Apollo 8’s was until now the last surviving full crew.
Quoting a bit upthread from ~2 weeks ago for context …
This post and the next few posts by our usual suspects 
were about financing for these various start-ups and the challenges specific to the “new space” industry but also how they’re applicable to new ventures into new markets of all sorts.
Today I was catching up on a financial blog I follow and encountered this entry from a month ago which is explaining a very interesting paper on the general topic of fashionable bubbles in the valuations of gold rush companies. Both the blog and the 3 papers it cites are worth a look for anyone who’s into the financial side of high tech & big industry.
ETA: There’s probably a thread on the EV or self-driving car biz that could benefit from a cross-link to this post; I just wasn’t quite sure which thread that would best be. Anyone?
The return to normal interest rates and the end of the ZIRP era is going to result in a lot of companies going under for lack of financing. The era of cheap/free money is ending.
This is probably a good thing, because there was a ridiculous amount of malinvestment due to artificially low rates. A lot of those speculative electric airplanes will likely vanish now - I think eHang is already in trouble. Hyperloop projects will hopefully die as well, as they were pretty much all scams.
But unfortunately, some perfectly viable businesses will likely go down as well.
ESA’s new Ariane 6 rocket passed a major full-scale rehearsal today in preparation for its first flight, when teams on the ground went through a complete launch countdown followed by a seven-minute full firing of the core stage’s engine, as it would fire on a launch into space…
A last hot-fire test of the upper stage is being prepared and planned for December 2023 at the Lampoldshausen test centre from Germany’s DLR aerospace agency.
Man, it should not be this hard to get excited about a rocket. Even SLS was an amazing launch. But Ariane 6? It’s just a slightly tweaked Ariane 5, supposedly cost reduced but in practice it looks like even that won’t pan out. Thankfully, there are a ton of upcoming rockets that are exciting–Starship, Neutron, New Glenn, even Vulcan. Oh well. I don’t want them to fail, but it’s hard to see any outcome other than a dozen or so launches a year from European government projects that are obligated to use it.
So they hot-fired part of the first stage on a pad in French Guiana. Next month they hope to hot fire an upper stage at a factory in Germany. Then they’ll put the upper stage on a boat to French Guiana, then eventually stack the whole thing, test a bunch more, then launch.
How … quaint.
Gotta make sure enough countries wet their beaks. Similar to how NASA rocket bits have to be transported all over the place. You build facilities in enough districts to make sure you maintain political support. Efficiency is a secondary concern for such people.