Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space! First off, I want to highlight a few stories we weren’t able to get to: First, Inversion Space raised a $44 million Series A to continue development of its ultra-precise orbit-to-Earth cargo delivery service. The company has already garnered a lot of attention from the DOD for its tech, which has fairly obvious military applications, so I figured we’d be seeing some new funding soon.
Second: Hats off to Blue Origin, which flew the New Glenn suborbital vehicle twice in a one-month span. The most recent flight, which took place on Friday, included engineer, science TV host, and former TechCrunch contributing writer Emily Calandrelli!
And finally, I hope all my American readers have a great Thanksgiving. May it be filled with friends, family, and good cheer.
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SpaceX’s sixth flight test of the Starship rocket was likely not the most exciting of the batch, but it did come with a critical milestone: The upper stage (also called Starship) briefly reignited one of its six Raptor engines while traveling halfway around the world for the very first time. Proving out this capability means that SpaceX will soon be able to test flying the upper stage on a full loop around the world and returning it to the launch site, where it can eventually be rapidly refurbished and reused.
I had the pleasure of chatting with one of the co-founders of Raven Space Systems, a startup based in the Midwest that’s developed a new process to enable the first scalable 3D printing of commercial, off-the-shelf thermoset composite components. These components are widely used across aerospace and defense, including for reentry vehicles and hypersonics.
“We’re essentially unlocking an entire field of 3D printing to production scale,” Raven co-founder and CEO Blake Herren said in a recent interview. “We’re taking these off-the-shelf materials that have been proven for both structures and thermal protection applications, and automating the near net shape production by 3D printing them for the first time.”
The first astronauts to celebrate Thanksgiving in space did so in 1973. Since then, there have been a few dozen Thanksgiving meals shared on the International Space Station. What do the astronauts eat? Why, the same things you and I do, except freeze dried: turkey, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and dessert. Click the link above for more photos of Thanksgivings over the years aboard the ISS.
