Hi, and welcome back to the TechCrunch space. Happy New Year! And…surprise!: This will be the last edition of TechCrunch space for the foreseeable future. I know, it's a bummer. But fear not: we'll still be reporting on space startups, so I hope you'll stay tuned.
And of course there will be one a lot Coverage is already shaping up to be quite fruitful this month, with Blue Origin preparing to launch its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time and SpaceX planning to demonstrate payload deployment using Starships, also for the first time. It's going to be a big year.
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About a quarter after founding, Jeff Bezos Blue Origin An orbital rocket is preparing to launch for the first time – and finally enter the competitive launch industry currently dominated by SpaceX.
I feel very, very hyped for this launch. An air traffic advisory A post last week suggested that Blue Origin could handle the launch before January 6, but that time is ultimately TBD and nothing has been confirmed by Blue Origin. Regardless, it's shaping up to be a huge year for Blue Origin's first orbital rocket.
We editor Julie Bort and I review a scoop published before 2024, which shows that SpaceX has offered some good deals to insiders who are allowed to buy secondary shares of the company. The story, which is based on internal SpaceX documents, provides an interesting look at the company's top investors.
This week in space history
This week, we're going back in history — back to the seventeenth century, when Galileo Galilei first recorded observations of Jupiter's four moons.
Why does this matter? When Galileo correctly assumed that the objects he was observing were moons orbiting a planet, it gave the Italian astronomer strong evidence that Copernicus was right: that the universe does not revolve around the Earth, but rather around the Sun. Here's a nice little write up From NASA on many of Galileo's discoveries of our solar system.