Hello and welcome back to Max Q!
In this issue:
CNBC broke the bombshell news that Virgin Orbit was pausing operations for at least a week while it looked for funding to support the business. As part of that pause, company executives reportedly told staff in an all-hands meeting that they were being furloughed — and that it would be unpaid. (Read TC’s Devin Coldewey’s take on this news here.)
The news isn’t exactly a surprise. Virgin Orbit’s financial woes have been discussed and dissected by the media for months — including here at TechCrunch — with many wondering how the company could sustainably continue operations.
That the news isn’t a surprise is exactly the problem.
NASA and Axiom Space just showed off the latest iteration of the spacesuit astronauts will wear on the surface of the moon when the Artemis III mission takes the first Americans to visit it since 1972. Improved in every way over the classic EVA suits of the Apollo era, the new Axiom Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or AxEMU, will make bunny hopping on the lunar surface much, much easier.
The AxEMU is a near-final version of the xEMU suit we’ve seen peeks of over the last few years of its development. The process worked much like other NASA-led efforts, in which the agency dictated the specs and helped create prototypes, but then contracted with a private company to actually build the things. The suits have been under development for a few years now, but we’re finally getting our best look yet at what future astronauts will be wearing on the moon.
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Source @TechCrunch
