We’ll start this week off by giving our congratulations to Skyroot Aerospace of India for successfully launching the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket yesterday. The company’s Vikram-1 booster stands 24 m (79 ft) tall and uses a somewhat unusual four-stage arrangement, with the first three stages using solid propellant and the final liquid-fueled stage being responsible for putting the payload into a precise orbit. With this successful launch, India becomes only the third country in the world with a private company capable of performing orbital launches.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have SpaceX’s prototype Starship, which elected not to leave Earth during a last-second (literally) launch termination on Thursday. Aborted launches are, of course, nothing new in the world of rocketry, especially when dealing with an in-development vehicle that has 33 engines that need to fire up at the same moment before it can leave the pad. But this dramatic abort was unique as it was the first time lift-off of the massive 124.4 meter (408 ft) rocket had been called off when the engines were already running.
Onboard systems took advantage of the very narrow window between the time the Raptor engines are switched on and the rocket actually leaves the launchpad to decide that it was not a good day to visit space after all. Word from SpaceX is that two of the Raptor engines on the first stage will be replaced and that they should be ready to make another launch attempt sometime this upcoming week.
While getting rockets off the ground is never easy, one thing that seems to have no trouble going up is the price of gasoline. Even still, Americans seem largely uninterested in electric vehicles, or at the very least, the slate of EVs that are currently available to them — especially now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has ended. Yesterday, TechCrunch ran an article about all the EVs that have exited the US market over the last year due to stagnant sales or import difficulties, and it’s quite a list.
