Year: 2023

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight SpaceShip Two

Virgin Galactic Unity-25

  • May 25, 2023

Unity-25Virgin Galactic launches the Unity-25 suborbital spaceflight aboard the SpaceShipTwo-class VSS Unity. Both crew and passengers are employees of Virgin Galactic, as this is effectively a proving flight following the Federal Aviation Administration’s grounding of the Virgin Galactic fleet in 2021 after its first passenger flight. Pilots Michael Masucci and C.J. Sturckow are at the controls; Beth Moses, Luke Mays, Jamila Gilbert, and Christopher Huie are the passengers. Flights following this one will be designated “Galactic” followed by the flight number.

Categories
Franchises Star Trek Television

Star Trek: Prodigy cancelled

  • June 23, 2023

Star Trek: ProdigyStreaming service Paramount Plus abruptly announces that the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy, created by Dan & Kevin Hageman, will be leaving the service a week after the announcement, at the end of June. The second season, deep into the post-production process, will be completed, and an attempt will be made to sell both the first and second seasons to another distribution outlet (though, as with recent cancellations on other streaming services, there is also a possibility of the show being shelved entirely as a tax write-down). After the announcement that Star Trek: Discovery’s upcoming fifth season will be its last, Prodigy is the second Star Trek series to be cancelled in 2023. (It is one of several shows to leave PAramount Plus on extremely short notice at the end of June.)

More about Star Trek: Prodigy in the LogBook

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight SpaceShip Two

Galactic 01

  • June 29, 2023

Galactic 01Virgin Galactic launches the Galactic 01 suborbital spaceflight aboard the SpaceShipTwo-class VSS Unity. The flight is piloted by Michael Masucci and Nicola Pecile, with Italians Walter Villadei, Pantaleone Carlucci, and Angelo Landolfi, and British citizen Colin Bennett, as the passengers. Some research objectives are carried out on this flight, which was delayed from a 2021 launch date.

Categories
Chandrayaan Uncrewed Spaceflight

Chandrayaan-3

  • July 14, 2023

Chandrayaan-3India launches the Chandrayaan-3 uncrewed lunar lander mission, expected to reach the moon in August after weeks of gradually increasing the vehicle’s orbital altitude until it slips from Earth orbit into lunar orbit. The mission profile is very similar to that of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which attempted to put a lunar lander named Vikram on the surface near the lunar south pole to look for signs of water.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight SpaceShip Two

Galactic 02

  • August 10, 2023

Galactic 02Virgin Galactic launches the Galactic 02 suborbital spaceflight aboard the SpaceShipTwo-class VSS Unity. The flight is piloted by CJ Sturckow and Kelly Latimer, with Birgin Galactic’s Beth Moses aboard as the astronaut instructor. The passengers are space tourists Jon Goodwin, Keisha Schahaff, and Anastatia Mayers. Goodwin is the first space traveler to fly after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

Categories
Luna Uncrewed Spaceflight

Luna 25

  • August 11, 2023

Luna 25Russia launches the Luna 25 uncrewed spacecraft on a mission to land near the south pole of the moon. This is the first mission in the Luna program, which has been dormant since the 1970s; if successful, the mission will be the first Russian soft-landing on the moon in almost 50 years. Much like India’s Chanrayaan-3 mission, launched a few weeks earlier, Luna 25 is intended to search for signs of water in the shaded areas of the lunar south pole, which could be a necessary resource for future crewed missions and possible long-term habitation of the moon.

Categories
Television

Babylon 5: The Road Home

  • August 15, 2023

Babylon 5Warner Bros. releases the animated movie Babylon 5: The Road Home. direct to DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital. Written by series creator J. Michael Straczynski, and featuring surviving original series stars Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Peter Jurasik, Bill Mumy, Tracy Scoggins, and Patricia Tallman, with new actors voicing other familiar characters from the series.

More about Babylon 5 in the LogBook and theLogBook.com Store
Babylon 5 now streaming on Amazon Prime

Categories
Luna Uncrewed Spaceflight

Luna 25 mission ends

  • August 19, 2023

Luna 25Russia’s Luna 25 mission to the lunar south pole ends unsuccessfully when an engine burn intended to lower the vehicle’s orbit around the moon into its final landing orbit goes awry. Luna 25 instead crashes into the moon as the result of the engine firing longer than expected. Contact with Luna 25 is not recovered following what the Russian space agency describes as an “abnormal situation”. The mission was Russia’s first attempt at a lunar landing in nearly 50 years.

Categories
Franchises Star Wars Television

Ahsoka

  • August 22, 2023

AhsokaStreaming service Disney+ releases the the first and second episodes of Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: Ahsoka, starring Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Following up on the events of Filoni’s previous aniamted series, Star Wars: Rebels, the first two episodes also feature Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World), David Tennant (Doctor Who), Clancy Brown (Earth 2, Highlander), and the late Ray Stevenson.

More about Ahsoka in the LogBook