Atlas V

And then of course it could add another 20 ton boulder to that for the hull back.

The core bus was relatively compact because it had to fit inside a five-meter fairing for like an Atlas V or a Delta IV Heavy, or even a Falcon Heavy.

SLS, yeah, sure.

But it was basically like a boxy structure, a couple of meters long, a couple of meters wide, a few meters long.

In preparation for this, a Soyuz MS-32 has been de-orbited, and I believe there might be some images of that out there.

April 28th, we saw an Atlas V launching out of Slick 41, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

This was carrying 29 Amazon LEO satellites.

This was the biggest, baddest Atlas V, the 551 variant.

It was also known as, well, it was the seventh of nine launches on this.

So yes, seventh of nine.

In the universe of science, humor is rarely absent for long.

Juno left Earth on August 5, 2011, rising from Cape Canaveral on the nose of an Atlas V rocket.

its journey was not a straight line but a long loop sketched twice around the sun borrowing earth's gravity for a dramatic slingshot in october twenty thirteen before striking out nearly eight hundred million k n toward the gas giant After almost five years of flight, on the night of July 4, 2016, on the anniversary of American independence, Juno powered down nearly all its instruments, turned around, and fired its main engine for 35 minutes to slow down, allowing Jupiter's gravity to pull it into orbit.

had that burn failed by even a fraction the entire mission would have skidded past the planet and been lost forever into the dark the burn succeeded and earth learned the news almost an hour later because that is how long light needs to cross the distance home during that interval of waiting the people following the mission had only one task left to trust that mathematics remained as true as it had always been The orbit Juno chose was itself unusual, almost reckless.

All right, so Vulcan is a new rocket from ULA.

It replaces the Atlas V in its Delta family of rockets.

It's launched four times.

It thought it was operational, but on two of those four launches, all of which, by the way, were successful.

So yeah, that flight was a success.

And just this morning, 2nd of July, we had LEO sat 29 of those launching on the Atlas V.

And this is the last flight of the big Atlas V, the one with five boosters, the one with a five meter fairing.

It's also the last flight of a Centaur III with a single RL-10 engine.

The only ones left are for Starliner.

carrying a KuiperSat or LEO, the very same type of satellites that Blue Origin's New Glenn was supposed to be carrying.

So yeah, this launch from Slick 41, it's the eighth of nine launches that ULA are gonna be performing on the Atlas V.

They still, of course, will have a number of launches in the Vulcan whenever that returns to flight.

But yeah, there was some concerns that New Glenn explosion might've affected some of the nearby launches, but they all proceeded on schedule, including a SpaceX Starlink launch.