The Orbital Mechanics Podcast

Bit of a weird show this week! No news, tired hosts. We talk about our favorite things from this year’s International Astronautical Congress, and we promise more information later.

Commercial Crew has fallen behind, but SpaceX is rushing to get Crew Dragon out the door.

DSCOVR's safehold seems to be connected to a gryo, but there's a fix coming down the line.

Starship, headed to Mars one day, got shown off to the public. Insight, already on Mars, learned some interesting things about the magnetosphere.

NASA wants to put a cubesat in a near-rectilinear halo orbit. Also, lots of updates on private space launch facilities.

H-IIB had a literal fire lit under its butt, and more info about Bigelow's expandable space stations.

Chandrayaan-2's lander made it to the surface a little sooner than planned. Also, more Hayabusa2 news and WFIRST inches towards reality.

Insight is slowly getting closer to a successful mole deployment, and Starhopper showed off its stuff!

Why have a structure with a heat shield on top, when you could just make a structure that does both jobs?

Linkspace successfully hovers, Exomars struggles with parachutes, and Vector Launch closes its doors.

Ella Atkins is an aerospace engineering professor who has a rich history studying and designing automated systems in space and in the air.

A GOES malfunction has now been explained. We're gearing up to hear more about Starship. OneWeb is opening its doors, and EDRS is performing well.

Northrop Grumman got a sole source contract to build a habitat module for the lunar gateway station.

The Apollo Guidance Computer is famous, but the code it ran likely would have slipped into the fog of history if it wasn't for Ron Burkey's archives.

India's headed to the Moon, though their launch was delayed after we recorded this episode.