The Month Space Got Weird (In a Good Way)
A look back at July 2021's dense run of space milestones, from Tiangong's first spacewalk to Ingenuity's new altitude record.
I’ve been covering space on and off for years, and I can’t remember a single month with this much packed into it. July 2021 started with a SpaceX rideshare launch on the 1st and somehow just kept escalating from there. By the time we hit the 31st, we’d seen a spacewalk from a brand-new space station, two billionaires ride their own rockets to the edge of space eight days apart, and a helicopter on Mars quietly rewrite its own record book. That’s a lot for four weeks.
The billionaires finally flew
Everyone’s going to remember July for Branson and Bezos, and fair enough — it’s the most made-for-TV space news in years. Branson went first, riding Virgin Galactic’s Unity vehicle on July 11, beating Bezos to the punch by nine days in what was obviously a bit of a race, whether either side wants to admit it publicly. Then on July 20 — the anniversary of Apollo 11 landing, which nobody involved seemed to think was a coincidence — Bezos took Blue Origin’s New Shepard on its first crewed flight.
The two vehicles aren’t really doing the same thing (Unity is a winged spaceplane that takes off from a runway, New Shepard is a vertical rocket-and-capsule that lands under parachutes), but the pitch to the public is basically identical: pay a lot of money, feel weightless for a few minutes, see the curvature of the Earth, come home. I’m genuinely curious how fast the price comes down once there’s real competition and a launch cadence to match. Right now this is still a toy for the ultra-wealthy, but so was a lot of aviation a century ago.
Meanwhile, actual science kept happening
It’d be easy to let the suborbital joyrides eat all the headlines, but the more consequential stuff this month happened elsewhere. China conducted its first spacewalk from the new Tiangong space station, which is a real milestone — it’s the clearest signal yet that China intends to run a long-term, independently operated station now that the door to the ISS has effectively been closed to them for years. Worth watching how fast they build this thing out.
And then there’s Ingenuity. The little helicopter that was only ever supposed to fly a handful of demonstration flights on Mars just keeps going, and on July 24 it set a new altitude record. It’s easy to undersell how wild this is: we have a solar-powered helicopter operating in an atmosphere about 1% as dense as Earth’s, controlled autonomously because the communication lag makes joystick flying impossible, and it’s still working months past its planned lifespan. NASA’s team has essentially turned a tech demo into an ongoing scouting asset for the Perseverance rover.
Add it all up and July might be the most action-packed month yet for what people are calling the new commercial space race — except “commercial” undersells it, since a state-run space station and a NASA-JPL helicopter were arguably the two most technically impressive things that happened. If August keeps this pace, I’m not sure my inbox can handle it.