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An Orbital Sciences’ Minotaur rocket tonight launched a record 29 satellites into orbit, 28 of which were cubesats.

An Orbital Sciences’ Minotaur rocket tonight launched a record 29 satellites into orbit, 28 of which were cubesats.

More here.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • There’s a Depnr launch tomorrow that will launch more.. but beyond just the numerical significance, it will be launching SkySat-1, the first Earth observing satellite for the US company Skybox Imaging. They are one of the perspective customers for Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne.

  • Steve Mackelprang

    Reading this made me wonder about the orbit/s of this group of satellite. Do they move as a group or are they positioned in such a way they move into dispersed orbits? The logistics of keeping track of all of this over time seems problematic to me, but I don’t know enough to really have a feel for the actual mechanics.

    One reads of the increasing amount of debris that is in orbit and while I realize the volumes of space involved are tremendous, releasing whole ” flocks” of birds seems to make things even more complicated.

  • Cubesats are not designed to stay in orbit very long. After a few months their orbits will decade and they will burn up in the atmosphere. Thus, they will not contribute to the space junk problems.

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