At Last, Boeing's Competitor Strikes True in Race to the Top

The United Launch Alliance was proud to announce the successful liftoff of an Atlas V carrying Boeing's CST-100 Starliner out of Space Launch Complex-41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The new launch carries NASA Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, marking what the Alliance refers to as "the return of human spaceflight to Cape Canaveral" while continuing a storied Atlas legacy.

Funky SAF Alternative Gets Vote of Confidence from Swiss Manufacturer

Pilatus and Synhelion have announced a partnership aimed at scaling up the use of solar fuels in aviation. Pilatus will lead by example, using Synhelion's fuels in its own operations, and offer them to customers in similar fashion. To that end, Pilatus even became a shareholder in Synhelion, a brand spun off of ETH Zurich in 2016. Synhelion is tackling the fuel issue from a different direction, building an "industrial solar fuel production plant" in Germany as a pilot plant, with a commercial one planned for Spain in 2025. They're understandably cagey about the specifics, given the amount of money spent researching the process, but the basic system coalesces solar rays on a single point to leverage that heat to catalyze water and C02 into something that passes for pure fuels. 

Rescheduled Launch Schedule Results in First Refund

A Japanese billionaire announced he would be pulling out of a prospective flight aboard one of SpaceX' Starships about 6 years after buying a ticket, citing a morass of delays and scheduling issues. The basic problem comes down to the launch schedule, as it always does. SpaceX hoped to help bootstrap development with fresh funding from would-be space tourists, but NASA's selection of the Starship platform for serious space missions threw all those plans into disarray.