Few missions more acutely embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the company has managed to pull back from the brink of disaster — more than once. That demonstration mission, dubbed Mission-1, launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4. The objectives of the mission are ambitious to the extreme: The two spacecraft — an orbital transfer vehicle called Quark-LITE and a target vehicle called Gluon — will eventually demonstrate extremely complex maneuvers, including rendezvous, docking, orbital transfer and on-orbit refueling. The company has faced two main issues related to communications and the s… Click below to read the full story from TechCrunch
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