This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Spanish launch company claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 km before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.
“This test flight has yielded valuable data, enabling us to validate crucial design elements and technologies that will underpin the development of our Miura 5 orbital launcher.”
A Scotland-based company, Skyrora, launched its suborbital Skylark L booster from Iceland a year ago, intending to reach an altitude of about 100 km.
There are perhaps as many as eight or 10 European companies with a credible chance of reaching orbit over the next five years with small launch vehicles, and there is finally some government support for the industry.
Perhaps more importantly, the German government recently said European nations should procure launch services through open competitions rather than awarding them to Arianespace by default.
For this reason, if the industry is to succeed, it seems incumbent upon the European Space Agency and nations to provide guaranteed launch contracts to ensure the startups do not fold before flying.
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Shouldn’t this be in /c/upliftingnews?
Take my upvote and get the frak out of here!
This is so cool!
Any reason we on earth should focus on a new space race and not what’s going on down here on the ground?
There’s no reason we can’t do both. Claiming money spent on researching/development of XYZ should take a backseat to some other problem is extremely short sighted.
For example, sattelites not only help us understand climate change, but are actively used to track down methane leaks, CFC leaks and other issues. We can track forest fires by sattelite as well, and fight them more effectively.
The only points where it really makes sense to say “why are we funding X when we should be focussing on Y”, is when X is actively detrimental for no real gain. For example, fossil fuel subsidies, meat subsidies, schemes that protect local products to the detriment of other (shipping Dutch pigs to Italy to produce “Parma” ham).
Many reasons actually. You more than likely have something on you and use something daily that only exists due to things implemented for space travel. Those “side products” really add up, since space is so frigging hard on everything, which forces human innovation to go beyond the current limits. That new ground is what fuels innovation, fuels economies, fuels wealth. And that in turn should power things like space travel, since that helps growing the space for innovation even further.
While I could point out obvious stuff like PV-panels or smartphones, how about thermoacoustic refrigeration? Invented for the James-Webb Telescope, they are currently evaluating entire new fields where this cooling method saves lots of power - remarkably, the Telescope was planned with this technology even though it did only exist as an idea at the time, not even as a working prototype. That created lots of jobs and now keeps creating new ones as it opens the field for cooling things to near-absolute zero that are highly sensitive to vibrations. They are still trying to understand the technology, since it works.
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