2021: A year in review

The top aerospace headlines from 2021

Dec 30, 2021

This newsletter officially marks one full year of content here at It’s Not Rocket Science. This is weekly newsletter number 52. I want to take a minute and say thank you to all of our subscribers and readers. While I really do love writing these articles, they need an audience, and I’m so appreciative of all of you for giving that to me.

Going into next year, we’ll be transitioning to semi-monthly newsletters. Now you’ll never know when an aerospace-themed soapbox will pop into your inbox! Surprise! I hope you’ve enjoyed this past year of articles as much as I have—can’t wait for the next one.

2021 has been a wild year. It was filled with Coronavirus, issues that have come from it, and issues that we created for ourselves a while ago but it took COVID to bring them out. There are still plenty of things to fix in this world but just because there’s work to do doesn’t mean we haven’t come a long way.

There are a bunch of articles out there that will tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly of 2021, so today we’ll focus on what we usually do—aerospace. Believe it or not, through supply chain, labor, and funding issues, the aerospace industry did some pretty amazing things this year. Today we’ll run through the biggest headlines of 2021, a lot of which we’ve talked about here. Let’s embark on a journey through the past…

February 18th—NASA messed around and landed a helicopter on Mars. Then they made it fly, and it’s been doing short “hop” missions all year. It’s collecting soil samples, exploring previously unreachable areas, and looking for ancient signs of life on the Red Planet.

April 29th—A Chinese rocket brought a piece of the new Chinese Space Station to orbit. Then, the booster fell down to earth—uncontrollably. When we talked about it, the booster was still falling. Since then, the debris from it landed safely in the Indian Ocean, about 4 weeks later.

May 12th—The US Military announced plans to capture solar energy with satellites and beam it down to forward operating bases. They didn’t explain much about how they plan to do it, obviously, but the general thought is that lasers can cut through Earth’s atmosphere much more easily than normal sunlight. This process has inherent inefficiencies to it, and it’s not perfect, but it gives the military a way to direct energy to bases in need anywhere in the world at any time.

May 22nd—Virgin Galactic flew a rocket plane in space. They took off like a normal plane, got up to about 50,000 feet, and deployed a rocket to take them the rest of the way. There were only two test pilots on this flight. The one with Richard Branson came later in July. This mission got 55 miles above the Earth’s surface. Pssh, I could drive that in under an hour.

June 3rd—United Airlines announced plans to purchase 15 supersonic commercial jets from Boom Supersonic in a deal worth around $3 billion. These jets plan to break the sound barrier and bring back New York to London travel in under 4 hours. Boom plans to incorporate sustainable aviation fuels, as well as other eco-friendly technologies to help curb the large emissions challenges that arise from faster-than-sound travel.

June 16th—China and Russia announced plans to build a base on the Moon by 2035. But, after the US followed suit with its own plans, China has sped up its timeline by almost 8 years. Their new target for an operating base is 2027. This may indicate a new space race in the coming years. I’m a little mad it'll be 50 years from the last one but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

July 11th—Richard Branson kicked off the 2021 displays of gluttony with his flight to space. I’ve touched on this before, and at the end of the day it’s rooted in ego but it actually will help in the long run. This was followed almost immediately by one of America’s other billionaires.

July 20th—Jeff Bezos took to the stars on his own Blue Origin Rocket to try and one-up Richard Branson. I’d say it worked. This mission took Bezos about 11 miles higher than Branson’s for probably scientific reasons but I like the idea that it was just Bezos being petty. Here’s a synopsis of the whole thing.

August 15th—China conducted test flights of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that had been grounded in the country for over a year following two fatal software related crashes. These test flights were to help recertify the aircraft for use in the country—the last major market to re-allow the MAX to take to the skies.

September 2nd—Firefly Aerospace, based in Austin, launched their Alpha test vehicle to prove their space fairing capability. This mission ended in flames after a fuel valve malfunctioned, causing the rocket to wobble and subsequently veer off course. Deemed unsafe, the launch official terminated the launch and hit the self destruct button. (seen below) [1]

Firefly's Alpha rocket explodes on inaugural test launch – Spaceflight Now

September 16th—SpaceX got in on the billionaire space race by launching Jared Isaacman and 3 other non-astronauts into space. Not only did they spend days in space, compared to mere hours from their industry counterparts, they were about 6 times further away from Earth. This was the ultimate one-up of both Virgin Glactic and Blue Origin.

November 8th—A US Air Force plane successfully launched and then caught in mid air a DARPA test UAV. Not much more to share, just thought it was cool…

November 17th—Russia admitted to launching an anti-satellite missile that endangered the International Space Station by sending debris into Earth’s orbit. That last part they denied though. Here’s the story.

December 24th—NASA successfully launched their newest stargazer—the James Webb telescope. This $10 billion magnifying glass will help us uncover more Earth-like planets, interstellar black holes, and more details on the origin of the Universe. It looks pretty cool too: [2]

30 years and $10 billion later, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally on the launch pad | Space

There are hundreds of other cool news stories that I didn’t have time to get to, but these are the ones that I’ve found to be the coolest. If I missed any, let me know! We can cover it in 2022.

Thank you for reading this edition of It’s Not Rocket Science. Once again, thank you for an amazing year, I couldn’t have done it without you. I hope you have had a safe, happy, healthy, and well fed holiday season. See you next year!

—Matt

It's Not Rocket Science

Discussion about this post