Atomos Space’s first mission on orbit is a trial by fire

Few missions more acutely embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the company has managed to pull back from the brink of disaster — more than once.
That demonstration mission, dubbed Mission-1, launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4. The objectives of the mission are ambitious to the extreme: The two spacecraft —…