Slingshot

With more active satellites than ever orbiting Earth—more than 8,300 at last count—helping them dodge space junk and avoid collisions is an increasingly important sector of the space industry. El Segundo, California-based Slingshot Aerospace aims to be the definitive source for information on space situational awareness. “We are building the common operating picture for space,” says Audrey Schaffer, the company’s VP of strategy and policy. By pulling in data from multiple sources and using machine learning and artificial…

We're going out on a limb here, but sometimes you've got to take a risk and make the tough calls Everybody loves a good indie-rock origin story — like Paul Westerberg holding it down as a janitor in the office of a Minnesota senator before joining the Replacements, or Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard teaching grade school while biding his time before Guided By Voices became a thing. Here’s a new one for you: Meet Mike Maple, a mailman in the small college town of Marquette, Michigan who spends his…

Orion has completed its flyby burn, committing the spacecraft to a December 11 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Image: NASAOn its 19th dayin space, NASA's Artemis I Orion spacecraft completed its final pass of the moon at 80.6 miles from the lunar surface en route back to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, due in a few days' time. Almost everything went to plan on Monday as mission control in Houston set the stage for Orion's return, powered by a lunar flyby burn, where it flew close enough to the Moon to…

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is set to slingshot around the Earth very soon. The space probe, which is destined to explore the Trojan Asteroids near Jupiter, will complete the slingshot on the first anniversary of its launch. The technique is needed to give Lucy extra orbital energy to reach those never-before-visited asteroids. The Trojan Asteroids are trapped in orbit around the Sun and rest roughly the same distance from our star as Jupiter does. Using Earth to slingshot Lucy toward the asteroids will put the…

On October 16, 2022, Lucy will fly by the Earth like a partner in a swing dance, boosting its speed and elongating its orbit around the Sun. At 7:04 am, Eastern Time, Lucy will make its closest approach at just 219 miles above the planet: lower than the International Space Station. This exceptionally close shave will increase its velocity by four-and-a-half miles per second, setting Lucy on track to gain even more speed when it returns to Earth for its second gravity assist in December 2024. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space…

We already got to see what it looks like when SpinLaunch literally throws something into the atmosphere at over 1,000 miles per hour. Now, though, the tenth test of the Suborbital Accelerator the company built is being tested by NASA and other organizations to see how it handles delivering payloads into space, and the result of this space slingshot is extremely promising. You probably aren’t alone if you’ve never heard of SpinLaunch. The company is one of the newer players in the world of space launches and…

A view of Flight Test 10, with the Flight Test Vehicle visible above the suborbital accelerator. Image: SpinLaunchA recent demonstration by alternative launch provider SpinLaunch suggests payloads containing sensitive equipment can endure the tremendous G-forces generated by the company’s suborbital accelerator. More than 150 partners, government officials, and industry enthusiasts gathered at Spaceport America in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico to watch the latest test of SpinLaunch’s A-33 Suborbital…

When we first encountered the Polaris Slingshot, it was in its new design with an in-house engine. That 2020 model was a lot of fun, but we bemoaned not having the ability to control gearing with the new automatic transmission. We were concerned, however, that the manual transmission offered would make the autocycle feel dangerous. We were wrong.The 2022 Polaris Slingshot doesn’t change much from the 2021 model, which introduced paddle shifters and a few other simple improvements to the vehicle. Our test model this time,…

Testing new satellites and space-based technologies has never been easy exactly, but it definitely could be easier. Slingshot 1, a 12U Cubesat mission just launched via Virgin Orbit, is an attempt to make building and testing a new satellite as easy as plugging a new keyboard into your computer. To say it’s “USB for space” is reductive… but not wrong. The team at the Aerospace Corporation that designed the new system makes the comparison itself, noting that the military has made several attempts to create just this…