Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Here's a list of what's on tap, kind of biased towards events early in the year:
New Years night (US time) -- NASA's New Horizons performs a flyby of Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule. (See the other thread.)
January 3 -- The Chinese Chang'e 4 lunar lander is scheduled to attempt a landing on the far side of the Moon.
January 17 -- Unmanned SpaceX Crew Dragon test flight. (Demonstration Mission 1 - DM1)
January 31 -- India's Chandryaan - 2 lunar lander will attempt a landing near the Moon's south pole, releasing a rover that will snoop around and look for water ice.
Early February -- The Insight Mars lander will commence its boring boring, hoping to place sensors at least 16 feet down.
February 12 -- NASA's Juno spacecraft will perform another close-range Jupiter flyby, hopefully returning more of those surrealistic photos of chaotic Jovian weather (kind of like a real life Mandlebrot set). NASA Juno photo:
February 13 -- Israeli private startup SpaceIL will try to land its own lunar lander (lunar landers seem to be the happening thing this coming year) with SpaceX launching it atop a Falcon 9.
Late February -- Japan's Hayabusa 3 may try to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu. (The vehicle is nearby and has been looking for a suitable site).
March -- Unmanned test flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule.
March -- Another SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, this one carrying a heavy communications satellite and not another of Elon Musk's cars.
April 4 -- Parker Solar probe perhelion (closest approach to the Sun for a while, its still adjusting its orbit).
April -- Elon Musk has been teasing a possible first flight for SpaceX's currently-under-construction sub-scale test-hopper Starship prototype, designed to ascend up to a few thousand feet, hover and then propulsively descend for engineering tests. 'Starship' is the new name for the huge upper-stage spaceship portion of the 'BFR'. The finished version will be as big as a navy frigate, capable of carrying a hundred people to Mars. The booster is now called 'Falcon Super Heavy'. (I guess that 'Big Fucking Rocket' didn't create the right impression.) I kind of doubt if this engineering test vehicle will fly this early but Elon suggests that it might.
June -- First SpaceX manned spaceflight using a Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon. Two NASA astronauts are currently training for that mission. I'm personally guessing that with manned spaceflights in the offing, SpaceX might delay the Starship test-hopper so that the company can concentrate all of its attention and resources on safely becoming a manned spaceflight program.
August -- If all goes well, the second SpaceX manned flight, this one will dock with the Space Station.
October-November -- The European Space Agency's Cheops exoplanet-hunting satellite is set to launch to join NASA's TESS which is already doing similar work. (Can't hurt to have two of them.)
Somewhere during the year Blue Origin is likely to fly its first manned flight of its New Shepherd suborbital rocket and Virgin Galactic will almost certainly fly its rocket plane again, probably several times. It might even start flying space tourists (Richard Branson wants to be the first of those). I believe that Boeing's Starliner will conduct at least one manned flight in 2019, but don't have the dates. (I think that I might have heard August for the first one.)
New Years night (US time) -- NASA's New Horizons performs a flyby of Kuiper belt object Ultima Thule. (See the other thread.)
January 3 -- The Chinese Chang'e 4 lunar lander is scheduled to attempt a landing on the far side of the Moon.
January 17 -- Unmanned SpaceX Crew Dragon test flight. (Demonstration Mission 1 - DM1)
January 31 -- India's Chandryaan - 2 lunar lander will attempt a landing near the Moon's south pole, releasing a rover that will snoop around and look for water ice.
Early February -- The Insight Mars lander will commence its boring boring, hoping to place sensors at least 16 feet down.
February 12 -- NASA's Juno spacecraft will perform another close-range Jupiter flyby, hopefully returning more of those surrealistic photos of chaotic Jovian weather (kind of like a real life Mandlebrot set). NASA Juno photo:
February 13 -- Israeli private startup SpaceIL will try to land its own lunar lander (lunar landers seem to be the happening thing this coming year) with SpaceX launching it atop a Falcon 9.
Late February -- Japan's Hayabusa 3 may try to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu. (The vehicle is nearby and has been looking for a suitable site).
March -- Unmanned test flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule.
March -- Another SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, this one carrying a heavy communications satellite and not another of Elon Musk's cars.
April 4 -- Parker Solar probe perhelion (closest approach to the Sun for a while, its still adjusting its orbit).
April -- Elon Musk has been teasing a possible first flight for SpaceX's currently-under-construction sub-scale test-hopper Starship prototype, designed to ascend up to a few thousand feet, hover and then propulsively descend for engineering tests. 'Starship' is the new name for the huge upper-stage spaceship portion of the 'BFR'. The finished version will be as big as a navy frigate, capable of carrying a hundred people to Mars. The booster is now called 'Falcon Super Heavy'. (I guess that 'Big Fucking Rocket' didn't create the right impression.) I kind of doubt if this engineering test vehicle will fly this early but Elon suggests that it might.
June -- First SpaceX manned spaceflight using a Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon. Two NASA astronauts are currently training for that mission. I'm personally guessing that with manned spaceflights in the offing, SpaceX might delay the Starship test-hopper so that the company can concentrate all of its attention and resources on safely becoming a manned spaceflight program.
August -- If all goes well, the second SpaceX manned flight, this one will dock with the Space Station.
October-November -- The European Space Agency's Cheops exoplanet-hunting satellite is set to launch to join NASA's TESS which is already doing similar work. (Can't hurt to have two of them.)
Somewhere during the year Blue Origin is likely to fly its first manned flight of its New Shepherd suborbital rocket and Virgin Galactic will almost certainly fly its rocket plane again, probably several times. It might even start flying space tourists (Richard Branson wants to be the first of those). I believe that Boeing's Starliner will conduct at least one manned flight in 2019, but don't have the dates. (I think that I might have heard August for the first one.)
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