The Norminal Newsletter issue #3
🚁 Ingenuity takes off, 🌕 NASA chooses SpaceX, 🚀 Crew-2 mission is a “GO“
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🛰️ MARS
Ingenuity takes off (5mins read)
NASA's ingenuity helicopter successfully completed a historic flight on Mars on April 19th, the 1.8 kg rotorcraft climbed to an altitude of 3 meters and maintained a hover for 30 seconds before touching back safely, Ingenuity's first flight was fully autonomous and lasted in total 39.1 seconds. As an homage to the Wright Brothers who succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, the Martian airfield on which the flight took place will now be known as Wright Brothers Field.
🚀 SpaceX
NASA chooses SpaceX for Human Landing System (3mins read)
As part of the Artemis program which will aim to send 2 American astronauts to the surface of the Moon by 2024, NASA has selected SpaceX to design and build the Starship Human Landing System. The contract valued at $2.89 billion will help accelerate the development of an already improving Starship vehicle, this critical step puts humanity on a path to sustainable lunar exploration.
SpaceX crew 2 mission is a “GO“ (5mins read)
The Crew-2 mission will take off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday morning April 22nd from NASA's historic Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the second flight of this particular Crew Dragon capsule named "Endeavour" that carried the two American astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS last year during the Demo-2 mission and the Falcon 9 first stage supporting this mission previously launched the Crew-1 mission in November 2020.
SpaceX booster improvements (10mins read)
Since the first Falcon 9 landed successfully, back in December 2015, there has been constant improvement with how they process the landed first-stage boosters to make the turnaround as fast as possible. The improvements range from upgrading to retractable booster legs, having two active droneships "Just read the instructions" and "Of course I still love you", adding the Octagrabber to secure the booster on the deck after a landing and flying dirty boosters. All these improvements are getting SpaceX closer to their 24h turnaround goal.
SpaceX SN15 timeline
After last week's cryo test, SN15 is aiming for a test flight by Friday this week, here's a timeline of SN15's test campaign
💨 Ambien pressure test ✅
❄️ Cryogenic test ✅
🔥 Static fire (Wednesday)
🚀 Flight (Friday)
🧑🚀 Launches
Soyuz returns to Earth (5mins read)
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, returned to Earth on Saturday, following six months living and working aboard the International Space Station. The crew departed the station in their Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft at 9:34 p.m. EDT Friday and landed safely under parachutes at 12:55 a.m.
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