The Space Stories That Made January 2021 Worth Watching

Every month has a few space headlines. January had a genuine glut of them, and it’s worth pausing before we flip the calendar to take stock of what actually happened.

The launch highlight came on January 24, when SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission put 143 separate spacecraft into orbit on a single Falcon 9 — the most payloads ever deployed from one rocket. That’s not a typo. It was a dedicated rideshare flight, packed with small satellites from a long list of commercial and government customers, and it says a lot about where the small-satellite business is heading: cheaper, more frequent, and increasingly indifferent to whether your payload is the primary passenger or one of a hundred-plus tagalongs. On top of that, SpaceX kept its Starlink cadence going, launching another batch of internet-relay satellites from Kennedy Space Center in the back half of the month — the company’s fourth Starlink launch in January alone. At this pace, the constellation is growing fast enough that a wider consumer rollout feels like it’s getting closer by the week.

Off the launch pad, the month’s more interesting story might be scientific access. China’s Chang’e 5 mission brought roughly 1,731 grams of lunar samples back to Earth in December, and on January 18 the China National Space Administration hosted representatives from 32 countries and organizations in Beijing to talk about joint study of that material. CNSA also published formal procedures for how researchers — domestic and international — can actually request access. China is only the third country ever to bring Moon material home, and opening that material up to outside scientists this early is a notable gesture, whatever the eventual politics of access turn out to look like.

The astronomy beat

January’s telescopes and survey data turned up a genuinely odd mix of finds. Researchers detailed TOI-561b, an ultra-hot rocky “super-Earth” about three times Earth’s mass, orbiting its star in under 12 hours with a surface hot enough to soften metal. Separately, astronomers announced the youngest supermassive black hole spotted to date, dating to roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang — early enough that it’s straining existing models of how black holes get that big that fast. And in a genuinely rare find, a sextuple star system turned up: three eclipsing binary pairs, all gravitationally bound into one six-star system, which is about as good a natural laboratory for multi-star dynamics as you’re going to get.

Meanwhile, the actual sky overhead has been worth a look too. With Perseverance still in cruise mode ahead of its February 18 landing in Jezero Crater, and mission teams running trajectory corrections and rehearsing entry, descent, and landing procedures, there’s a real sense of countdown building. In the meantime, the northern hemisphere’s winter nights have been offering clean views of Orion and the rest of the winter constellations — a good excuse to step outside for ten minutes if you haven’t already. February is shaping up to be the month all of January’s preparation actually pays off.