The Thanksgiving meal will commemorate NASA’s 50th year of celebrating the holiday in space.

NASA TV

The Expedition 70 crew will savor a lavish holiday feast, thanks to the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which delivered supplies on November 11.

@SpaceX has launched its eighth Falcon 9 mission of November, as it heads towards its first 10-launch month and conceivably its first 100-launch year.

After multiple delays, billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is finally ready to begin commercial space flights — and you can snag a ticket for $450,000.

The background: In June 2021, Virgin Galactic became the first spaceline to secure permission from the FAA for commercial space flights, suggesting that it was pulling ahead of rivals Blue Origin and SpaceX in the space tourism arena.

While both of those companies planned to use rockets to send crewed capsules into space, Virgin Galactic’s idea was to put people in a spaceplane — a vehicle that can fly through Earth’s atmosphere like a plane, but also navigate space like a spacecraft.

We have lost the data from the second stage…

SpaceX/ Twitter.

The much-anticipated launch was scheduled to take place yesterday, November 17, but had to be delayed by a day to swap out one of the Super Heavy first-stage booster’s grid fins.

SpaceX is targeting Saturday for the second flight of Starship. The company has received regulatory approval for the flight. The flight will feature the newly added hot staging ring, allowing the Ship to separate from the Booster while the Booster engines are still firing. The stack features multiple upgrades compared to the first flight, including 63 upgrades SpaceX submitted to the FAA to mitigate issues from the first flight. Ahead of the launch, SpaceX will close the road, evacuate the village and surrounding area, and clear the potential blast radius.

Booster 9 will attempt a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 25 will attempt to fly around the earth before performing a reentry and hard splashdown in the Hawaiian area.

Window Opens: November 18th at 7AM CST (13:00 UTC)
Window Closes: November 18th at 7:20AM CST (13:20 UTC)

Mission: Starship’s second fully integrated test flight.

BERLIN — As SpaceX prepares for its next Starship test flight, a NASA official said that the use of that vehicle for Artemis lunar landings will require “in the high teens” of launches, a much higher number than what the company’s leadership has previously claimed.

In a presentation at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee Nov. 17, Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator in NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, said the company will have to perform Starship launches from both its current pad in Texas and one it is constructing at the Kennedy Space Center in order send a lander to the moon for Artemis 3.

SpaceX’s concept of operations for the Starship lunar lander it is developing for the Human Landing System (HLS) program requires multiple launches of the Starship/Super Heavy system. One launch will place a propellant depot into orbit, followed by multiple other launches of tanker versions of Starship, transferring methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the depot. That will be followed by the lander version of Starship, which will rendezvous with the depot and fill its tanks before going to the moon.