What a week for space!

Hello and welcome to the latest newsletter from satsearch. In this email we take a look at some of the big news from the space industry in the last 7 days.

We also share a wealth of new resources produced by the satsearch team in the last few weeks.

Let's dive in! ?

Something blown, something new

It's been a busy week in the space industry around the world, with new launches and missions grabbing a lot of public attention. First up let's deal with Starship - unfortunately, another "rapid unscheduled disassembly" occurred a few minutes after launch - read more here.

Mechzilla did successfully catch the Super Heavy booster again, and SpaceX has put out statements explaining they have a good idea about the cause of the issue (and are investigating further), and have taken many lessons from the latest test flight. However, this isn't the result that SpaceX would have wanted given the explosion in January and the loss of a Falcon 9 booster earlier in the week.

Meanwhile the European Space Agency - ESA and ArianeGroup successfully launched Ariane 6, for the second time, from French Guiana, putting a French intelligence satellite into orbit at around 800km altitude -?read more here. Also, the secretive United States Air Force X-37B spaceplane landed?on Friday at Vandenberg Space Force Base, marking the end of it's 434-day mission - read more here.

It's great to see launches (and, indeed, landings) from multiple organizations across the world, just showing how the industry is developing and changing, even though there are a lot of uncertainties at the moment due to geopolitics and business climates. ?

Lunar landings

Last week not one but two privately run spacecraft landed on the surface of the Moon. First up, Firefly Aerospace 's Blue Ghost spacecraft had a successful soft landing in a region called Mare Crisium - read more here.

Blue Ghost is carrying a range of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration experiments that will now be deployed and activated to start collecting data as soon as possible.

A few days later the Intuitive Machines (IM) Athena spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface, close to the South Pole. Unfortunately, the tall lander appears to have fallen on its side on landing and communication has now been lost. The engineers are racing to salvage what value they can from the mission and, as always, aim to learn as mush as possible along the way. Read more here.

Despite this, the mission must be seen as at least a partial success, and it is also impressive that this is the second time IM has made it to the Moon in a little over a year.

With the right institutional backing and an ambitious engineering program, space companies are making new mission concepts possible for the private sector that were previously only achievable by governments - and we hope the trend continues for a long time! ?

The latest resources from satsearch

In this section you can see an overview of the latest resources for space engineers produced by satsearch over the last few weeks since our last newsletter - hope you find something here to help accelerate your mission program:

• A new supply chain hub on attitude sensors and a short guide on sourcing and procurement of them.
• A new supply chain hub on attitude actuators and a corresponding procurement guide.
• An overview of the global market for inertial sensors for attitude determination including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs).
• New supply chain hubs for satellite power equipment, spacecraft propulsion hardware, software, and components, and space electronics.
• An article on meeting space engineering challenges with satsearch.
• An article on building solutions for future opportunities or challenges in the space industry.
• An article on electronic design and development for space, from a supply chain perspective.
• An article on satellite bus and platform procurement and engineering.
• We've also received three fantastic testimonials in the last week from;

1. Ronnie Nader , former astronaut and now Chief Designer and Director of Space Operations at satsearch Trusted Supplier the Ecuadorian Space Agency (EXA)

2. Struan Johnston, Director at satsearch Trusted Supplier CAVU Aerospace, and

3. Adam Hlá?ik , Technical Project Manager at TRL Space , who we have helped with procurement and supply chain support.

To find out what the industry, on both the demand- and supply-side, thinks about satsearch, you can view all our testimonials here. That's it for this week! We'll be back soon.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed today's email. If you have any questions or comments please hit reply and let us know - we read and respond to every email we receive.

And if you need?procurement support for your next mission, simply share your requirements with us and we'll do all the hard work for you!

You can also browse thousands of space products and services on the satsearch marketplace and submit specific requests for quotes, lead times, documentation, or whatever else you might need.

Ad astra!

(Please note that this email newsletter edition is an identical, or at least very similar, piece to a recent email published on our public mailing list. The reason for this is that not every mailing list subscriber follows this LinkedIn newsletter, and vice versa, so we like to give maximum value to our audience by sharing it with as many people as possible).