Hi, and welcome back to 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 there will certainly be a lot to cover. This month is already shaping up to be quite consequential, with Blue Origin preparing to launch its towering New Glenn rocket for the first time and SpaceX planning to demonstrate payload deployment using Starship, also for the first time. It’s going to be a big year.
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Story of the week
Nearly a quarter-century after its founding, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is gearing up to launch an orbital rocket for the first time — and finally enter the competitive launch industry that is currently dominated by SpaceX.
I am feeling very, very hype for this launch. An air traffic advisory posted last week suggests that Blue Origin may conduct the launch no earlier than January 6, but that timing is ultimately TBD and nothing has been confirmed by Blue Origin. Regardless, this will hopefully be the beginning of a huge year for Blue Origin’s first-ever orbital rocket.
We’re revisiting a scoop that editor Julie Bort and I published earlier in 2024, showing that SpaceX offered some good deals to select insiders who are authorized to buy secondary shares in the company. The story, which is based on internal SpaceX documents, provides an interesting look into the company’s top investors.
This week in space history
This week, we’re going back in history — way back to the seventeenth century, when Galileo Galilei recorded observations about Jupiter’s four moons for the first time.
Why does this matter? When Galileo correctly guessed that the objects he was observing were moons orbiting around a planet, it gave the Italian astronomer strong evidence that Copernicus was right: that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, but instead around the sun. Here’s a nice little write-up from NASA on Galileo’s many discoveries of our solar system.
