Spaceflight news

— Lucy on track for 2021 launch (americaspace.com)

— Rocket Lab increases performance (spacenews.com) (PDF: rocketlabusa.com)

— NASA to coordinate smallsat rideshares (spacenews.com)

— Heat management becomes a new bottleneck in the smallsat era (spacenews.com)

Short & Sweet

— Dragon’s first commercial crew mission (spacenews.com)

— A new industry seeks standardization (spacenews.com)

— Ingenuity recharges its batteries on its trip to Mars (phys.org)

Questions, comments, corrections

— “Fun paper Friday” (HT Andrew Z: frontiersin.org)

— ROSCOSMOS’ Chibis suit (blogs.nasa.gov)

— Csaba via email: reactors vs. RTGs, the highest flying bird, and 1976 splashdown vs 1975.

Interview -- Caty Pilachowski, Professor of Astronomy at Indiana University

— WIYN Telescope (wikipedia.org)

— IU Faculty profile (astro.indiana.edu)

— twitter.com/iuastro

This week in SF history

— 11 August 1962: Launch of Vostok 3 (russianspaceweb.com)

— Next week in 2003: A flame-retardant spacecraft.