“On Thursday morning, at a time when most people in the United States were sleeping, Jeff Bezos’ space company sent its first rocket into orbit.

At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket’s methane fuel.

Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.

The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ rocket company. It should quiet critics who say that the company has been too slow compared with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has dominated global spaceflight industry in recent years. New Glenn could prove a credible competitor with Mr. Musk’s company and win launch contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as commercial contracts.”

From New York Times.

“India said it has successfully executed the first space docking experiment, becoming only the fourth country in the world to master a critical technology required for other ambitious projects…

For the Space Docking Experiment mission, or SpaDeX, India had put into orbit two small satellites on Dec 30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Andhra Pradesh state. The technology allows India to transfer payloads, lunar samples, or eventually humans in space from one satellite or spacecraft to another.”

From Bangkok Post.

“A space twofer took place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.

Why did two moon landers share one rocket?

That was the result of fortuitous scheduling by SpaceX and not something that was planned by Firefly or Ispace.

Firefly had purchased a Falcon 9 launch to send its Blue Ghost lander to the moon. At the same time, Ispace, to save on the costs for the mission, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket launch that was going roughly in the right direction to get its Resilience lander to the moon. That turned out to be Blue Ghost’s trip.

‘It was a no-brainer to put them together,’ Julianna Scheiman, the director for NASA science missions at SpaceX, said during a news conference on Tuesday.

After the Falcon 9 rocket reached orbit, the second stage fired again for a minute so it could deploy Blue Ghost in an elliptical orbit around Earth, about an hour after launch. The rocket stage fired once more, for just a second, to adjust the orbit for the deployment of Resilience, about 1.5 hours after launch.

On Wednesday morning, Firefly and Ispace announced that their spacecraft successfully turned on, established communications with ground stations on Earth and were operating as expected.”

From New York Times.

“Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed more than 40 stars within the gravitationally lensed ‘Dragon Arc’ galaxy, 6.5 billion light-years from Earth. It is the largest group of individually imaged stars ever seen at such a distance.”

From Live Science.